Literature / Horus Heresy

It is a time of death. The death of the body. The death of the spirit. But above all, the death of hope.

"I never wanted this. I never wanted to unleash my legions. Together, we banished the ignorance of Old Night. But you betrayed me, you betrayed us all. You stole power from the Gods and lied to your sons. Mankind has only one chance to prosper, if you will not seize it, then I WILL. So let it be war, from the skies of Terra to the Galactic Rim. Let the seas boil, let the stars fall. Though it takes the last drop of my blood, I will see the galaxy freed once more. And if I cannot save it from your failure, Father, then let the galaxy BURN!"

— Horus Lupercal

In the Backstory of the Warhammer 40,000 universe is humanity's era of hope, only just starting to dawn after the long and terrible Dark Age, before it is brought to an end by the Horus Heresy, wherein fully half of the best warriors the human race had to offer turned to worshipping dark gods and nearly wiped out the other half. The God-Emperor was permanently injured in a lethal duel with their leader, the Primarch Horus (his son, in a way), to the point that he is only kept alive by an extremely complex life support device known as the Golden Throne.

Long established in the background as being directly responsible for the shape the galaxy is in in the 41st millennium, it is the subject of the Horus Heresy series of novels and audio books, by various authors. Beyond the core conflict with the legions of Space Marines, their Primarchs, and the Emperor, the narrative splits into various sidestories fleshing out virtually every major aspect of humanity's civil war, and the events preceding it.

The series began in 2006, and as of mid-2019, it consists of 38 novels, 103 short stories and novellas (some of which are collated in 21 anthologies), 47 audio dramas (plus 4 audio drama anthologies), 2 artbooks, 2 scriptbooks, and 1 graphic novel. The Primarchs sub-series (another 17 novels, 7 short stories, and 4 audio dramas) focuses specifically on the leaders of the Space Marine Legions. From 2019, the main series has officially been ended, and new works are being published as part of The Siege of Terra sub-series, focusing on the titular conflict and serving as a capstone to the overall series (8 novels, the last of which is split into three volumes, plus 3 out of an unspecified number of planned novellas). The series is one of the Black Library's most popular, with new titles regularly appearing in The New York Times bestseller list.

Numbered books in the series

• Horus Rising by Dan Abnett
• False Gods by Graham McNeill
• Galaxy in Flames by Ben Counter
• The Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow
• Fulgrim by Graham McNeill
• Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon
• Legion by Dan Abnett
• Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter
• Mechanicum by Graham McNeill
• Fallen Angels by Mike Lee
• A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill
• Nemesis by James Swallow
• The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett
• The Outcast Dead, by Graham McNeill
• Deliverance Lost by Gav Thorpe
• Know No Fear by Dan Abnett
• Fear to Tread by James Swallow
• Angel Exterminatus by Graham McNeill
• Betrayer by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• Vulkan Lives by Nick Kyme
• The Unremembered Empire by Dan Abnett
• Scars by Chris Wraight
• Vengeful Spirit by Graham McNeill
• The Damnation of Pythos by David Annandale
• Deathfire by Nick Kyme
• Pharos by Guy Haley
• The Path of Heaven by Chris Wraight
• Angels of Caliban by Gav Thorpe
• Praetorian of Dorn by John French
• The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• The Crimson King by Graham McNeill
• Ruinstorm by David Annandale
• Old Earth by Nick Kyme
• Wolfsbane by Guy Haley
• Slaves to Darkness by John French
• Titandeath by Guy Haley
• The Buried Dagger by James Swallow

The Siege of Terra series

Core Series

• The Solar War by John French
• The Lost and Damned by Guy Haley
• The First Wall by Gav Thorpe
• Saturnine by Dan Abnett
• Mortis by John French
• Warhawk by Chris Wraight
• Echoes of Eternity by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• The End and the Death: Volume I, by Dan Abnett
• The End and the Death: Volume II, by Dan Abnett
• The End and the Death: Volume III, by Dan Abnett

Novellas

• Sons of the Selenar by Graham McNeill
• Fury of Magnus by Graham McNeill
• Garro: Knight of Grey by James Swallow

The Primarchs series

• Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar by David Annandale
• Leman Russ: The Great Wolf by Chris Wraight
• Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero by Graham McNeill
• Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia by Guy Haley
• Lorgar: Bearer of the Word by Gav Thorpe
• Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix by Josh Reynolds
• Ferrus Manus: The Gorgon of Medusa by David Guymer
• Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris by Chris Wraight
• Vulkan: Lord of Drakes by David Annandale
• Corax: Lord of Shadows by Guy Haley
• Angron: Slave of Nuceria by Ian St. Martin
• Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter by Guy Haley
• Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First by David Guymer
• Alpharius: Head of the Hydra by Mike Brooks
• Mortarion: The Pale King by David Annandale
• Rogal Dorn: The Emperor's Crusader by Gav Thorpe
• Sanguinius: The Great Angel by Chris Wraight

Upcoming titles are:

Anthologies related to the book series:

• Sons of the Emperor, a limited-edition compilation of short stories originally distributed during the 2018 Horus Heresy Weekender convention.
• Scions of the Emperor, the second anthology, released February 2019.
• Blood of the Emperor, a third anthology, released March 2021.
• Heirs of the Imperium, a fourth anthology collecting the previous three in the sub-series, with five new stories.

Horus Heresy Character Series

• Valdor: Birth of the Imperium by Chris Wraight
• Luther: First of the Fallen by Gav Thorpe
• Sigismund: The Eternal Crusader by John French

Upcoming titles are:

• Eidolon: The Auric Hammer by Marc Collins

Novellas in the series

• Promethean Sun by Nick Kyme
• Aurelian by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• Brotherhood of the Storm by Chris Wraight
• The Reflection Crack'd by Graham McNeill
• Feat of Iron by Nick Kyme
• The Lion by Gav Thorpe
• The Serpent Beneath by Rob Sanders
• Calth That Was by Graham McNeill
• Corax: Soulforge by Gav Thorpe
• Scorched Earth by Nick Kyme
• Tallarn: Executioner by John French
• Prince of Crows by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
• The Crimson Fist by John French
• The Purge by Anthony Reynolds
• Ravenlord by Gav Thorpe
• The Seventh Serpent by Graham McNeill
• Tallarn: Ironclad by John French
• Cybernetica by Rob Sanders
• Wolf King by Chris Wraight
• The Honoured by Rob Sanders
• The Unburdened by David Annandale
• Garro: Vow of Faith by James Swallow
• Sons of the Forge by Nick Kyme
• Weregeld by Gav Thorpe
• Dreadwing by David Guymer
• Spear of Ultramar by David Annandale

Anthologies

• Tales of Heresy, edited by Nick Kyme and Lindsey Priestley
• Age of Darkness, edited by Christian Dunn
• The Primarchs, a collection of four novellas, edited by Christian Dunn
• Shadows of Treachery, edited by Christian Dunn and Nick Kyme
• Mark of Calth, edited by Laurie Goulding
• The Imperial Truth, a 2013 events' exclusive, edited by Laurie Goulding
• Sedition's Gate, a 2014 events' exclusive
• Legacies of Betrayal
• Death and Defiance, , a 2014 events' exclusive, edited by Laurie Goulding
• Blades of the Traitor, a 2015 events' exclusive
• Meduson, an exclusive available only at Black Library's quarters
• War Without End (comprising The Imperial Truth, Sedition's Gate, Death and Defiance and Blades of the Traitor)
• Eye of Terra
• The Silent War
• Corax by Gav Thorpe
• Garro by James Swallow
• Shattered Legions
• Tallarn by John French
• The Burden of Loyalty
• Born of Flame by Nick Kyme
• Heralds of the Siege

Audio Dramas

• The Dark King and The Lightning Tower by Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett (September 2010)
• Raven's Flight by Gav Thorpe (February 2010)
• Butcher's Nails by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (May 2012)
• Grey Angel by John French (August 2012)
• Burden of Duty by James Swallow (October 2012)
• Warmaster by John French (December 2012)
• Strike and Fade by John French (December 2012)
• Veritas Ferrum by David Annandale (December 2012)
• The Sigillite by Chris Wraight (March 2013)
• Censure by Nick Kyme (July 2013)
• Thief of Revelations by Graham McNeill (November 2013)
• Khârn: The Eightfold Path by Anthony Reynolds (December 2013)
• Lucius: The Eternal Blademaster by Graham McNeill (December 2013)
• Cypher: Guardian of Order by Gav Thorpe (December 2013)
• Hunter's Moon by Guy Haley (2014)
• Wolf's Claw by Chris Wraight (2014)
• The Long Night by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (2014)
• Master of the First by Gav Thorpe (2014)
• Garro stories by James Swallow:
  • Oath of Moment (December 2010)
  • Legion of One (April, 2011)
  • Sword of Truth (November 2012)
  • Shield of Lies (2015)
  • Ashes of Fealty (2015)
• Red-Marked, by Nick Kyme (2016)
• Grey Talon, by Chris Wright (2016)
• The Binary Succession by David Annandale
• The Soul, Severed by Chris Wraight
• Perpetual by Dan Abnett
• Dark Compliance by John French
• Blackshields: The False War by Josh Reynolds
• Blackshields: The Red Fief by Josh Reynolds
• Hubris of Monarchia by Andy Smillie
• Nightfane by Nick Kyme

Related books

• Battle of the Fang by Chris Wraight is technically not a part of the Horus Heresy series, but it is the culmination of A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns.
• Angels of Darkness by Gav Thorpe was written a few years before the Horus Heresy books got started, but its B-plot revolves around Astelan, one of the "fallen" Dark Angels, and his recollections of the final schism of the Dark Angels. Astelan would later become one of the focus characters in Fallen Angels.
• Titanicus by Dan Abnett, which wraps up some hanging plot threads from Mechanicum.
• Macragges Honour, A comic book by Dan Abnett and Niel Roberts, which follows the crew of the Ultramarines' flagship as they give chase to Kor Phaeron during the Battle of Calth.
• The Night Lords trilogy by Aaron Dembski-Bowden is set after the Heresy, but has enough flashbacks and chapters set during that time that it not only functionally acts as the Night Lords' entries in the Heresy series due to covering more of their actions than the "official" Heresy novels to date, but also provided at least one character for the Horus Heresy tabletop game.
• The Black Legion series has sections that function as a direct sequel to the events of the Horus Heresy series.
• The Thousand Sons series directly continues the plot of Ahriman.
• Pandorax is a Distant Finale to the events of The Damnation of Pythos.
• Wrath of Iron is loosely connected to Fulgrim.

Related games

• The Horus Heresy Trading Card Game: A spin-off of the previous 40k TCG. The card artwork was later collected in the artbooks Collected Visions (which used the card art exclusively) and ''Visions of Heresy." (Which interspersed the card art alongside artwork from the book covers and previously released art from the Warhammer 40k base game.)
• The Horus Hersey: Legions, a CCG video game with characters and units based on the series.
• The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn, a hex-based turn-based strategy game which focuses on the planet Tallarn after it was virus bombed by the Iron Warriors.
• The Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth, a VR strategy game which takes place on the planet of Calth, where the Word Bearers will betray the Ultramarines legion.
• The series also received a series of rule and army books from Forge World, allowing 40K players to build and play armies from the Horus Heresy.

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Provides Examples Of:

A-D

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The sewer system of Sothopolis is so huge that three Astartes can walk arm to arm without difficulty and still have space for people to hide out of their view. The POV character lampshades it, then points out that the system is planned out for the much bigger city that Sothopolis is going to become.
• Achilles in His Tent:
  • In A Thousand Sons, Magnus locks himself in his pyramid out of remorse and lets the Thousand Sons be decimated by the Space Wolves. Near the end of the battle, he finally gathers the will to go out and save his sons.
  • After Alpharius chases his Legion into the Alaxxes Nebula and the Khan refuses to help, Leman Russ locks himself up in his quarters aboard the Hrafnkel and doesn't come out until his second-in-command is getting ready for a Last Stand.
• Action Prologue:
  • The first novel, Horus Rising, begins with the Luna Wolves storming the palace of the Emperor of Mankind and Horus personally slaying said Emperor. Said battle is revealed to merely be a minor engagement against a government that was coincidentally named like the Imperium of Man. The sequence introduces the Luna Wolves Legion as well as Garviel Loken, one of the main characters of the book.
  • Deliverance Lost starts in the later stages of the battle of Isstvan V, with Corax and the Raven Guard beside him preparing for a last stand before they are evacuated by an allied fleet.
  • Betrayer starts with the battle of Armatura, a combined Word Bearers and World Eaters assault on one of Ultramar's best defended worlds. How the XII Legion operates is presented through Kharn's eyes. Highlights feature Lorgar tanking a Titan's fire and Angron lifting its leg.
  • Ruinstorm begins with the Blood Angels being attacked by daemons while trying to cross the Ruinstorm while Guilliman's flagship is ambushed by a flotilla of traitor ships.
• Action Survivor: With all the citizens getting caught up in events, there are bound to be a few. One of the most notable is Euphrati Keeler, an imagist (photographer, in other words) of the Remembrancer Order who survived two separate daemon attacks, and looks to be shaping up even further to being the first Imperial Saint.
• After the End: The Horus Heresy era is essentially humanity rebuilding itself after its first interstellar empire collapsed thousands of years before. In the backstory, Earth had been rendered all but utterly inhospitable to life due to centuries of nuclear/chemical/biological warfare (with a little Chaos sorcery thrown in for good measure) during the isolation of the Age of Strife. If the Emperor hadn't shown up when he did, it most likely would have continued on and been left a burned-out lifeless rock (though he burned his share of places). Then we get to see all the OTHER human planets that went through cataclysms of their own during that time, never mind those that were completely obliterated on purpose.
• A Good Way to Die: All Space Wolves want to die well and want to be remembered for it. It's not that they want to die, it's that they want to die fighting.
• Akashic Records: In Mechanicum, the Akashic Reader was a psychic machine meant to read past innovations from the Warp, and would enable humanity to regain the technological peak that slipped away after the Dark Age of Technology. It was an important plot element, although its near-completion was set to the backdrop of the Horus Heresy, and it never really got off the ground before it was destroyed entirely.
• Alien Geometries:
  • The Laeran Temple, the entirety of the Furious Abyss, the Eldar, etc. Many places highly connected to the warp being to take on strange architecture and defy logic, reflecting the inherent madness of the warp.
  • There's also the tomb of the Dragon beneath Mars in 'Mechanicum'.
  • Yet both of the above pale in comparison to the unfathomably ancient and bizarre Webway, where non-Euclidian geometry is the norm.
  • In The End and the Death, Terra itself has become this, as Chaos has begun to submerge the entire world into the Warp, and space and time are being corrupted as a result. It begins with roads seeming to stretch on forever, people being separated in a crowd and ending up miles apart from one another, and traitor forces appearing behind loyalist lines, but it rapidly gets worse and worse until the Imperial Palace starts to occupy the same space as the Vengeful Spirit, creating a corrupted and incomprehensible labyrinth. To illustrate how bad it's getting, the Adeptus Custodes, who are supposed to have absolutely perfect knowledge of the Palace's layout, find themselves getting hopelessly lost within moments of leaving the (relative) safety of the Throne Room.
• Aliens Speaking English: Or Gothic, rather, as seen in "Descent of Angels," when Imperial envoys land on Caliban and reunite with the natives for the first time in roughly 5,000 years, there's no language barrier keeping the two groups from communicating.
• All According to Plan:
  • The daemon that possesses Kasper Hawser basically tells him this about the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves' conflict.
  • Averted, in a prime example of how Tzeentch's plans always "fail," yet end up benefiting his power-base anyway. It was supposed to be a Mutual Kill, yet he ended up recruiting the Thousand Sons (which it probably planned for also), and both Legions survived.
• All Just a Dream: Corvus rescuing Vulkan in Vulkan Lives turns out to be a dream/illusion inflicted on the latter by Curze's psykers as part of the torture.
• All of the Other Reindeer:
  • Some Primarchs were this way before they were rediscovered by the Imperium, due to just how different they were from vanilla humans. Some of those who would turn traitor were still suffering from this because of how radically different they were from the ideal that the Emperor had in mind for them, (e.g., the Night Haunter being a psychopathic terror tactician and Lorgar setting up churches to the Emperor).
  • It's also present among their sons, here and there. In some Legions, the Terran Astartes are isolated or even ostracized, since they didn't come from the primarch's homeworld and/or didn't see eye-to-eye on tactics or ethics.
• All There in the Manual: A strange inversion is found in the audiobooks: because Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames were initially released as abridged versions, they cut out several plotlines, including the one involving the First Saint, Euphrati Keeler. Thus, if one were only listening to the audiobooks, they'd be very confused when they got to Flight of the Eisenstein (which was released unabridged), and suddenly a plotline is picked up that's been missing for three books, with characters the listener has never heard of. All three have subsequently been released unabridged.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Space Wolves attack the Thousand Sons' homeworld of Prospero, supposedly to censure them all, but Horus had manipulated the communications so that the order was to kill all the Thousand Sons instead. The Space Wolves and a whole army invade a severely crippled Prospero whose defenses have been sabotaged by a guilty Magnus, but the Thousand Sons do put up a good fight.
• Amazon Brigade: The Sisters of Silence, composed entirely of women Blanks, are one of the Emperor's exclusive elite strike forces, usually used to investigate and take care of warp-related matters as their nature as blanks allow them to negate it.
• Ambadassador: Ambassador Vethorel, representative of Fabricator General Kane on the Council of Terra. In The Binary Succession, the loyalist members of the Mechanicum are paralyzed because there are two Fabricator Generals they can follow, and are frustrated because of how the Imperium is ignoring them. To save her people and prevent them from abandoning the Imperium completely, she successfully campaigns for the creation of an "Adeptus Mechanicus", which will sacrifice Mars' independence for more agency in the Imperium. Despite having enemies from all factions trying to off her, Vethorel survives and performs a remarkable feat of Aggressive Negotiations with the help of the Legio Titanicus (an Imperator Titan is piloted towards the Council), leading to the creation of said Adeptus and shaping the politics between Terra and Mars for the rest of the story.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Played for laughs in the prologue of Horus Rising, and deliberately spun that way as an example of hilarious irony by Loken and Torgaddon. That book begins with the phrase "I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor". To any Warhammer fan that would make you sit up and take notice, but it turns out that Loken is speaking of a fairly inconsequential battle against a different star system of nine worlds and a yellow sun with its central civilization located on the third world, ruled by an Emperor sitting on a golden throne. The narration makes it quite clear that part of the enjoyment of the story is appreciating the absurd irony.
• A Mech by Any Other Name: Dreadnoughts and Titans regularly pop up in the story, usually as a sign that a battle is so important these war machines have to be called upon. Martian Knights bridge the gap between the two.
• A Million Is a Statistic: In Prospero Burns, the Space Wolves drop a Quietude graving dock onto the planet below. The Wolves' response: howl, shout, and shake their fists. The Imperial Army Leader's response: To chew out Leman Russ for destroying the electronic data and knowledge from the dock.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • Melee weapons are prevalent in the 40K universe, as backups and as preferred weapons by some forces. 30K is no different.
  • Astartes melee weapons include ye olde axes. The cover of Prospero Burns shows a Space Wolf with a freakin' wooden buckler.
  • The official explanation for this - you can decide if it is a hand-wave or not - is that in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, unlike our own, the balance of warfare has swung back to favor armor over ranged weapons. So, while in the modern world armor has played second fiddle to range since the advent of the musket, in 40K armor is once again ascendant.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Bear, AKA Bjorn, loses an arm in Prospero Burns.
  • A Luna Wolves sergeant amputates his own mangled hand only a few scenes into the series.
• And I Must Scream: You can't help but feel a little sorry for Fulgrim. In the Reflection Crack'd Fulgrim turns the tables on the Daemon and regains his body, trapping the Daemon in the painting. By then he's become even worse than the Daemon.
• And Show It to You:
  • In Know No Fear, Roboute Guilliman tells Lorgar that he's going to rip out Lorgar's heart and show it to him. He ends up doing it to Kor Phaeron instead.
  • Horus tears out both of Iacton Qruze's hearts in the climax of Vengeful Spirit.
  • Jaghatai Khan inflicts this on a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh at the climax of Path of Heaven.
• And Then What?: Touched upon a few times throughout the series. Horus and Guilliman have decreed that all of their sons are to learn skills and knowledge unrelated to war, because they believe the Great Crusade has to end eventually, and both of them want their Astartes to have a place in the golden age that will follow. Things...don't turn out that way.
• Animorphism: Some Space Wolves "fall" and become Wulfen, who are essentially werewolves. Psykers and daemonic abilities can force this change on a Space Wolf.
• Annoying Arrows:
  • Averted to the Warp and back by the Interex, whose primary weapon is a technological bow... which can shoot an arrow straight through a Space Marine in full armor.
  • Played straight when Horus gets hit in the arm by an Interex and pulls it out casually. Justified as he's a Primarch, and absurdly hard to harm.
• Anti-Magic:
  • Blunters, blanks, and pariahs, including the Silent Sisters, a military force composed entirely of female human blanks. All of these are resistant to the warp or even can negate its effects because of a rare genetic quirk. Several of these characters appear during the series and are the Imperium's trump card against the occult.
  • The Culexus assassins are trained exclusively from Pariahs, the strongest anti-psykers produced by humanity.
• Anti-Villain: Magnus changes sides less because he wants to stick it to his father and more because he has no other choice. In Scars, he (or rather, one of his shards) even advises Jaghatai to stay by the Emperor's side.
• Apocalypse Wow:
  • In Prospero Burns, the Space Wolves drop a graving dock onto a planet, making a continent-sized crater. Also, they later use plasma weapons, las bombardments, kinetic munitions, gravity bombs, targeted missiles, magma bombs and atomic bombs on Prospero. It is hinted that the bombardment created new fault lines!
  • Galaxy in Flames has Horus virus-bomb Istvaan III, killing its entire population and ecology. Then he ignites the now-volatile atmosphere, scorching the planet down to the bedrock.
  • During the Battle of Molech in Vengeful Spirit, orbital bombardment obliterates the upper half-kilometer of a mountain, annihilating the forces around it.
  • Thirty pages of Know No Fear are spent by Dan Abnett putting Michael Bay in charge and completely annihilating Calth both in space and on land. The entire sky erupts with fire, tanks fall from above like rain, falling starships cause earthquakes and tsunamis, and then the Word Bearers attack.
  • In A Thousand Sons, Prospero is utterly destroyed by the Space Wolves.
  • Daemonology has the Death Guard methodically kill a world and everything on it.
  • Several times throughout the Siege of Terra, the utter destruction happening to the titular homeworld of humanity is described in loving, horrific detail. Echoes of Eternity and The End and the Death in particular devote lots of page time to showcasing the absolute devastation, as they take place in the final days of the Siege where Terra is nearly overrun by both the traitor armies and the Warp itself.
• Arc Words:
  • Played with a bit. Because most readers of the Horus Heresy books will already know what's going to happen and have an omniscient view of the storyline, they will know that "I can't say" is the challenge/answer phrase for the secretive warrior lodges. Every time it is used, it always refers to clandestine lodge business that is not for the ears of outsiders. In Legion, it is used in an odd context, as the Alpha Legion is not shown to have a lodge. Then in Nemesis Constantin Valdor utters, in a completely different but equally clandestine context, "I can't say", reinforcing the theme of shadow wars and intrigue occurring in the background.
  • Samus. That's the only name you'll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.
  • In later stories the phrase "The Emperor Protects" takes on a hidden meaning.
  • In A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns we have "There are no wolves on Fenris."
  • "Let the galaxy burn." 10,000 years later, the Traitor Legions are still following Horus's orders.
  • "The Mark of Calth" is becoming one for the Ultramarines, essentially becoming their version of Never forget.
  • The word "Murder" starts appearing in a variety of contexts, to different characters on both sides towards the end of the war.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: Horus has many, many highly trained and disciplined mortal armies at his command, but the Traitors also make use of huge numbers of gangers, abhumans, and such. By the time of the Siege of Terra, his mortal forces have deteriorated into a savage rabble and even the traitor Legions are losing their last shreds of discipline and order thanks to rampant Chaotic corruption.
• Artifact of Doom:
  • The Kinebrach Anathame is a magically-crafted weapon and the sword that wounded Horus and set him up for his fall to Chaos. It's not done doing horrible things yet.
  • The Laer Blade seemed to be a primitive sword, albeit perfectly made. Any reader who's familiar with it will know that it was host to a Keeper of Secrets.
  • The Daemons Kyriss and Ka'Bandha use an artefact known as the Ragefire which amplifies the bloodlust of the Blood Angels because it is fueled by a fallen Blood Angel. It nearly corrupts the entire Legion, but Apothecary Meros destroys the artefact, allowing himself to be consumed by it but saving the Blood Angels.
• Artificial Limbs:
  • In the thirtieth millennium, replacing lost or damaged body parts is a fairly common procedure, and is often done voluntarily by factions such as the Iron Hands and the Adeptus Mechanicus. Space Marines in general tend to acquire a lot of artificial parts, due to the nature of their job.
  • It is mentioned that Bear will get one after Prospero Burns.
  • Throughout the series, Adeptus Mechanicus characters are shown wearing all sorts of extreme cyber-implants, as their faction sees this as a form of communion with the Machine God.
  • In the novella Feat of Iron from The Primarchs, the Iron Hands' predilection for artificial limbs becomes a key plot point when the Eldar use sorcery to control those limbs to attack their owners
• As the Good Book Says...: Magnus the Red quotes Revelation 21:8 at the Council of Nikea.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!:
  • What many think the Space Wolves do, but they're actually more tactically smart than other Imperials tend to assume.
  • This is roughly the hat for the World Eaters.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: The Blood Angels find the Cathedral of the Mark in Fear to Tread: A massive temple devoted to Slaanesh made entirely out of human bones.
• Attempted Rape: Invoked Trope. In Fulgrim, Serena D'Angelus lies to Lucius that she murdered another remembrancer in self-defense because he was about to rape her. To really hammer in how the corrupted legion is falling in on itself, Lucius shrugs it off, telling her that he'll send somebody in to clean up for her.
  • In a flashback, Curze kills a man in the act.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: More or less a requirement for being the First Captain of a Space Marine Legion. Ezekyle Abaddon of the Luna Wolves/Sons of Horus, Sigismund of the Imperial Fists, Raldoron of the Blood Angels, Sevatar of the Night Lords, Jubal Khan of the White Scars (though the Khans aren't given numbers, he's the most prominent after the Noyan-Khans) and Gabriel Santar of the Iron Hands are all considered the best warriors of their respective Legions. Even the more intellectually inclined Legions' First Captains, such as Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons and Ingo Pech of the Alpha Legion, are noted for being formidable warriors. Kor Phaeron, as First Captain of the Word Bearers, defeated Roboute Guilliman in single combat, and could have killed him had he not decided to try his hand at corrupting him. He is arguably the single most formidable combatant in the Legions that is not a Primarch.
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel:
  • Space Wolves wear hand-made leather clothing. They also drape tanned wolf hides over their armor.
  • Horus wears a massive fur cloak over his armour. Both he and Jaghatai Khan wear furs in their downtime.
  • Simple robes are a staple of Imperial clothing.
• Awesome by Analysis: The Ultramarines have this as their hat, in addition to ruthless efficiency and peerless discipline. Sergeant Aeonid Thiel recognizes that bladed weapons and flames work better against daemons because of their ritual significance, and also works out the ingress points on his ship that the Word Bearers would use.
• Ax-Crazy: Angron has implants in his skull called the Butcher's Nails that drive him mad with constant pain and aggressive urges. This, coupled with his perpetual anguish over how the Emperor basically made him watch his best friends die, makes him utterly incapable of relating to (relatively) normal human beings. This, coupled again with how the Nails keep him from any restive sleep, further contributes to his insanity. Along with the brain damage being inflicted by the Nails, it's all slowly killing him. Nevertheless, the World Eaters willingly accept the same horrible implants (a much, much less severe version, of course) in order to gain an insight to their Primarch's character and to better relate to him. In essence, they seek kinship with their father by breaking themselves on the same anvil upon which he was shattered. It's quite beautiful, in a twisted way...
• Awful Truth:
  • In The First Heretic, Lorgar and the Word Bearers discover the "Primordial Truth" of Chaos, where Ingethel says that those who accept the Chaos Gods will be taken into their power, while those who reject them will be cast out and eaten by daemons, and that the Emperor created the Imperial Truth to deny Chaos and damn humanity to stagnation. There's just one problem: Ingethel was lying. In Deliverance Lost, when a Word Bearers ship is pulled into the Warp by the Raven Guard, the crew, both human and Word Bearer, are eaten by daemons. The Chaos Gods don't care what happens to those who worship them.
  • Another moment is in Mechanicum novel, when it's pretty much confirmed that the Machine God worshipped by the Mechanicum is actually Mag'ladroth, C'tan of technology, who was defeated by the Emperor in ancient times and imprisoned on Mars in order to inspire technological breakthroughs. Then the book with knowledge about containment was stolen, so he's likely to awaken in the 42nd Millennium...
• Back from the Dead: Vulkan, many times, due to his Resurrective Immortality. Living seems to have stuck with him for good at the end of Deathfire.
• Badass Boast:
  • I am the Storm's Blade, I am Justice, I am Defiance and I am the Oath Keeper! -Cerberus, Legion Of One
  • Now? Now Prospero falls. -Leman Russ, Prospero Burns
  • I will find you, I will kill you, and hurl your toxic corpse into Hell's mouth. -Roboute Guilliman, to Lorgar
  • I am justice! I am judgement! I am punishment! -Sevatar, The Long Night
  • I am the Imperial Fist! I am fear incarnate! -Rogal Dorn
• Badass Bookworm: Kasper Hawser is remade by the Space Wolves. They give him super strength, youth, fast reflexes and an eye that uses night vision. Without any training in fighting, he takes out several Imperial Army personnel without breaking a sweat.
• Badass Longcoat: The Space Wolves wear skins of giant wolves.
• Badass Normal:
  • Dinas Chayne, an elite Lucifer Black and former Child Soldier but still a standard human, manages to fight the Primarch Alpharius for a few moments. Maybe. It might have been a regular Alpha Legionnaire.
  • A mild example would be that of the Priest in the short story "The Last Church". He openly defies the Emperor, willingly choosing death rather than embrace the new ideology of the Imperium. This is an old man, alone in the last Church on Terra. He is surrounded by psychopathic proto-astartes. After this Imperial representative has spent the last hour trying to destroy the priest's faith via argument, he defies the Emperor to his face. It's hilariously ironic given it was the Emperor who unintentionally inspired him to turn to faith in the first place in the aftermath of a failed rebellion in which the Priest took part as a young man, and therefore not even the being he thought was God, telling him not to believe, could break his faith.
  • Ollanius Persson veers into Fights Like a Normal, as his superpower contributes indirectly, albeit greatly, to his fighting skills. It turns out he's one of the original Argonauts, and fought at Austerlitz, Verdun, and the Battle of 73 Easting.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • Galaxy In Flames is a Foregone Conclusion since it details the events that happened at the beginning of the Horus Heresy; the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, World Eaters, and Emperor's Children purge their loyalist elements at Istvaan III. After a virus bombing and prolonged ground battle fails to kill all of them, Horus withdraws his forces and finishes the job with another orbital bombardment.
  • Fulgrim, since it details Fulgrim's descent to Chaos, and he manages to become the bad guy who won. He's the only Primarch that's flat out won in his every appearance. While every other Primarch is off fighting his own petty battles, Fulgrim gets the first Primarch kill of the Heresy, fights off the daemon who possessed him, has the first legion to successfully convert to recognizable Chaos Marines, and becomes the first to ascend to daemonhood.
  • Damnation of Pythos sees the daemons winning. The Grey Knights eventually cleanse the planet several millennia later in a different piece of canon entirely, but by that time the Big Bad is long gone.
  • Angels of Caliban has Konrad Curze as a rare example where the bad guy hardly does anything, yet at the end of the book he's the only one who gets what he wants: Imperium Secundus torn down without a shot fired. With the revelation that Curze's visions mean the Emperor lives, Sanguinius is resolved to leave for Terra to fight Horus while Guilliman has a Heroic BSoD over whether or not The Emperor is going to think him a heretic for establishing a second empire. And Lion El'Jonson unable to return to Caliban and stuck as Curze's new jailer. Curze ends his time in the book laughing in mocking triumph.
• Bait-and-Switch: In Betrayer Princeps Audun is introduced as an egotistical ladder climber, grasping for position after his superior dies and earning the ire of Moderati's Toth and Keeda. When they are issued transfer orders off the legio's flagship Titan Syrgalah they proceed to tear into him about the undeserved demotions. He asks if they bothered to read the transfers, which is enough of a hint that they realize they were being promoted to full Princeps, commanders of their own Titans, and are forced to accept him chewing them out about them assuming the worst about him after a single, disagreeable encounter.
• Balkanize Me: The Dark Angels homeworld of Caliban, under the command of Luther, ends up seceding from the Imperium amid the turmoil of the Heresy for a myriad of reasons, including but not limited to the extreme resentment of its garrison for being Reassigned to Antarctica, widespread hatred of the Imperium's destruction of Caliban's ecosystem and culture, and its defenders being slowly and subtly corrupted by the planet's inherent Chaos taint.
  • It's also implied that the Alpha Legion is starting to splinter into countless cells, all of them pursuing their own plans and agendas without regard for what any other part of the legion is doing.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: In Know no Fear Roboute Guilliman gets blown out of his flagship's bridge into space without a helmet by a daemon attack. The ship is big enough to have enough gravity to have a very thin atmosphere on its hull, which is enough for the Primarch to survive for ten hours and still have enough stamina to punch some Word Bearers to death.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Erebus exploited Horus' pride to convince him to personally lead the assault on Davin's moon (Ignace Karkasy describes Erebus' performance as the greatest acting job he's ever witnessed) and then exploited the Mournival's devotion to their primarch to let him take Horus to the Serpent Lodge.
  • After the Emperor's Children have gone into full insanity, the daemon possessing Fulgrim gets arrogant and starts slipping character, confident that the Legionnaires are too far gone to notice or care. Despite the Emperor's Children becoming some of the most twisted and depraved traitors the galaxy has ever seen, the last thread of decency among them is that they are still loyal sons, and Lucius uses this to unify the captains into trying to rescue Fulgrim. After they capture and torture Fulgrim to exercise the daemon, Fulgrim breaks free, and reveals to his sons that he managed to beat the daemon with his own Heroic Willpower some time ago. He was acting out of character because he wanted to see how far they would go, purely from a vain desire to have his sons demonstrate how loyal and dedicated they are to him (the potential pain was another great motivator, but that's a different story). Lucius even catches on that the tiny hints that he could actually beat the thing wearing Fulgrim's body was just trying to goad Lucius into dueling him. Afterwards, the Emperor's Children are actually impressed by the ploy.
• Battle Cry: Pretty much every Legion's got one. The Space Wolves make snarls, roars and "leopard-growls" as well as "Hjolda Fenris!". The Sons of Horus use "Lupercal!" and "Kill for the living, kill for the dead!". The Ultramarines call out "Courage and honour!".
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: An unusual case where Kasper Hawser's mind was being altered by a daemon. He couldn't fight the beast and he could only regain his memories by altering his dreams. Space Wolf Rune Priests attempted to help him fight the being, but one of them was turned into a wolf. This priest claimed Horus turned evil. Later on, Kasper walks through a room in Tizca and into the room that he is in in his dreams. The daemon combined the two realities. Therefore, it was a battle in the center of the mind outside of the body (where Space Wolves could run into his mind and shoot it). It took the arrival of a Rune Priest, two Dreadnoughts and two dozen Silent Sisters to beat it back.
• Bearer of Bad News:
  • Nathaniel Garro, who brought the news of Horus' betrayal to Rogal Dorn, who then returned to Terra to tell the Emperor.
  • In The Outcast Dead: Kai Zulane, after finally removing the mental block in his own psyche, tells the Emperor that He is going to die. The Emperor already knew this.
• Bear Hug: To the surprise of everyone, Lion El'Jonson gives Guilliman one when they meet on Macragge.
• Because Destiny Says So: Curze lets his visions lead him and decide on his course of action. In his titular novella, a voice that may or may not be the Emperor tells him that this was his greatest mistake; he allowed his visions to shape him into a sociopathic monster because he unquestioningly accepted that the worst possible outcomes were inevitable and refused to try and change them. Curze doesn't react well to this.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Curze attempts this on Vulkan, torturing him and trying to prove every man is evil at heart. In the end, he fails, but Vulkan goes completely insane.
• Below Decks Episode: The entirety of Legion plays out from the POV of human characters swept up in the Alpha Legion's web of deceit. Several major subplots in the Siege of Terra series are dedicated to showing what it would feel like to be a mere human swept up in one of the biggest and most brutal battles in galactic history.
• Berserk Button:
  • In the Istvaan Massacre, an enraged Corax goes on a rampage through the traitor ranks. It could also be Badass Teacher as he is protecting his "students."
  • Don't interrupt a Space Wolves' "sending" ceremony unless it is extremely serious or you will end up dead.
  • Dorn dislocates Garro's jaw and then threatens to kill him for naming Horus a traitor without proof.
  • Insulting a Space Marine's primarch is a great way to get yourself on the wrong end of a bolter or a sword.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • During the virus bombing of Istvaan III, the loyalist Death Guard Dreadnought Huron-Fal and his friend Captain Ullis Temeter decide to go out on their own terms. "This death... this death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory." [overloads Dreadnought reactor]
  • In Fear to Tread, the Blood Angels find ships that tried to flee from Signus Prime that lacked warp-engines, meaning that the people knew they were going to die in space. Being Astartes, they're mystified as to why anyone would do that, until the Shipmistress of the Red Tear explains it: whatever was happening in the Signus Cluster was so terrifying that they willingly chose a slow death in the void over being killed by the invaders.
• BFS: Even considering that any given Astartes' or Primarch's sword is this to an ordinary human, Rogal Dorn and Leman Russ's favoured weapons are colossal.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence:
  • The Battle of Isstvan V, a.k.a the Drop Site Massacre, is one of the greatest battles in the Horus Heresy, with eleven Legions being involved. It is first presented in Fulgrim where its main events are summarized, but following volumes describe specific parts of it, from the Word Bearers' first engagement of the Gal Vorbak to Corax trying to survive on the battlefield.
  • Mechanicum features the start of the civil war between the factions of the Mechanicum loyal to the Emperor and the separatists, with armies of Skitarii, entire Knight houses, and Titan Legios being involved in the great war on Mars.
  • Prospero Burns describes the razing of Prospero, with the Vlka Fenryka descending upon the eponymous planet to massacre its population. Prospero is defended by the Thousand Sons and the local militia, with the war climaxing with Magnus personally fighting Leman Russ in his own courtyard.
  • Know No Fear narrates the entirety of the Battle of Calth, from the ground engagements between the Word Bearers and the confused Ultramarines to the space battles between the Word Bearers fleet and the remnants of Ultramar's fleet.
  • Fear to Tread ends on the entire Blood Angel Legion engaging a host of daemons of Khorne and Slaanesh and Sanguinius pitting himself against Ka'Bandha, one of Khorne's most powerful Bloodthirsters.
  • Master of Mankind features the final battle of the War Within the Webway, with a host of daemons assaulting the ruins of an Eldar city held by the Legio Custodes and Silent Sisters, supported by a host of skitarii and a Titan Legio. The Emperor himself steps into the fray and demonstrates his might by engulfing a whole section of the Webway with psychic flames that destroy most of the daemons.
  • The Siege of Terra books are an entire series of this, featuring void battles in which entire moons are blown up and space hulks are used as fire ships, continent-spanning trench warfare, rampaging hordes of daemons and beastmen, brutal close-quarters fighting beneath the Palace walls, primarchs fighting primarchs and greater daemons, Titan legions waging battles of mutual annihilation, gigantic siege engines rigged with supersized sonic weaponry, aerial duels between hundreds of fighters at a time, and orbital bombardments that are so intense that they shift the planet's tectonic plates.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Horus performs one during the battle of Sixty-Three Nineteen, when he teleports into the throne room of the local "Emperor" who has activated a Doomsday Device and kills the Emperor and deactivates the device in a single shot, which saves Garviel Loken.
  • During the Battle of Calth, Guilliman is blown into space by a daemon, but later reappears to save Thiel and his men from a being killed by a boarding party of Word Bearers. As it turns out, his flagship Macragge's Honour is big enough to trap a thin atmospheric envelope around its hull, and Guilliman's transhuman constitution allows him to breathe in it.
  • In Master of Mankind, the Emperor, free from the Golden Throne as one thousand psykers are sacrificed to power it, goes to the Webway just as his forces are overwhelmed by a a host of daemons. He singlehandedly turns the tide of the battle, purges a great artery of daemonic presence, and allows whatever remains of his army to evacuate the Webway.
  • In Old Earth, Vulkan participates for a grand total of one minute in the Battle of the Aragna Chain, when he teleports into the vessel Horus Triumphant to smash apart a Contemptor Dreadnought that was about to kill the Salamander Nuros and his boarding party.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Flight of the Eisenstein: Garro and his companions manage to escape Istvaan aboard the Eisenstein and warn Rogal Dorn and Malcador the Sigillite about Horus' betrayal. On the other hand, many of them are now detained indefinitely, and the youngest Astartes of the group is corrupted by Chaos and must be put down by Garro.
  • Descent of Angels: Zahariel manages to save Lion El'Jonson from a bomb, but is blamed alongside Luther and is ignominiously sent back to Caliban to supervise recruitment for the Legion.
  • Mechanicum: The Dark Mechanicus doesn't get their hands on Magma City's technology, and the Void Dragon has a new guardian in Dalia. However, the majority of the protagonists are dead, any chance of regaining humanity's lost knowledge through the Akashic Reader is gone for good, and Mars is left to its own devices, with the Mechanicum and the Dark Mechanicum fighting a bitter war against each other^note And even that won't last forever, as it's all but confirmed that Mars falls to the traitors in the end.
  • Deliverance Lost: Corax is prevented from creating an army of new enhanced Legionaries with a complete loss of the genetic material necessary for his operation, a few valiant Raven Guard die and one of their bases is trashed. However, Corax is not discouraged by the new setback and decides to lead his Legion to a campaign of sabotage on Horus' territories, while the unlucky Raptors who were turned into monstrosities do ultimately fight for the Emperor.
  • Know no Fear: Calth is devastated and the Ultramarines suffer catastrophic losses, but they manage to repel the Word Bearers and the troops and population on the surface still live defiantly in the face of annihilation.
  • Fear to Tread: The Blood Angels are saved from being corrupted to the side of Chaos, but the Legion loses their flagship, suffers a lot of casualties from having to fight a daemonhost, and Apothecary Meros sacrifices himself to save his Legion, becoming corrupted in the process.
  • In a Foregone Conclusion sort of way, the entire series is this — Horus is slain, the Heresy is ultimately thwarted as his forces retreat, and the Imperium lives to fight another day, but the Emperor has been placed on life support, the galaxy is doomed to face a gauntlet of conflicts over the next several thousand years that will lead to untold trillions of deaths, the Imperium is condemned to become a stagnant, brutal, superstitious theocracy, and the forces of Chaos gain a lot of new supporters as the Chaos Gods become more powerful.
• Black Site:
  • In Deliverance Lost, the Raven Guard convert one of their strongholds, which is situated in the middle of a radioactive wasteland on the forge world of Kiavahr (which Deliverance orbits), into a facility where they develop their new Legionaries - the Raptors, using the Emperor's own gene-tech. However, Alpha Legion agents infiltrate the facility and foil the project.
  • In the short story Serpent Beneath, Omegon orders a strike force of Alpha Legionnaires to attack one of the legion's own secret black sites, which is dedicated to the study of a strange artefact which may be a Black Pylon and is being used to stall the White Scars.
  • The secret facilities on Titan, future headquarters of the Inquisition and the Grey Knights, are used to contain individuals of special interest, such as former associates of the Traitor Primarchs.
  • In Unremembered Empire, Guilliman has his mad brother Vulkan contained in an underground facility. Vulkan quickly escapes, embarrassing Guilliman as he had been chastising El'Jonson about keeping secrets from each other.
• Blatant Lies: "There are no wolves on Fenris". Fenrisian wolves are actually normal humans who succumbed to the same genetic engineering flaw that creates Wulfen from Space Wolf Marines when the planet was being colonized. There are no wolves, just mutant humans.
• Blind Seer: Cyrene Valantion, aka "The Blessed Lady", in The First Heretic.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Believe it or not the Space Wolves fall under this. Their legion name is an overly literal translation of their true name: the Vlka Fenryka, the "Wolves of Fenris", or as they prefer to call themselves "the Rout". This seems to be a common problem with translating Fenrisian into Imperial Gothic.
• Blood from the Mouth:
  • The Nurth dude in the first chapter of Legion.
  • Eada Haelfwulf and Ulvurul Heoroth, AKA Longfang, in Prospero Burns. Also, Thousand Son Astartes and the daemon bleed from the mouth, well as other orifices, when confronted with powerful marks of aversion and pariahs.
  • Anyone dumb or desperate enough to use Enuncia.
• Blood Magic: Aside from the obvious Chaos-related nastiness, the Black Cube that the Nurth possess requires the deaths of hundreds, even thousands, of people to activate.
• Blood Oath:
  • How else would you expect the Blood Angels to seal their oaths of moment?
  • In A Thousand Sons, after a Thousand Son succumbs to the flesh-change and accidentally kills a Space Wolf, Leman Russ swears a Blood Oath that there will be a reckoning between him and Magnus.
• Blue Blood: Several characters, and many of them use their influence to get into positions of power, so many Imperial Army officers fill this trope as well.
• Boarding Pod: Legionaries use boarding torpedoes to board enemy vessels. Any void battle will involve boarding torpedoes at one point as each party seek to capture the enemy vessel.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: A cruel example in The End and the Death. When the Emperor teleports onto the Vengeful Spirit, his own Custodes bodyguards are overcome by the raw power of Chaos and attack him. This even manages to anger the Emperor because the Custodes were His companions, and not just his soldiers.
• Bond One-Liner: Sanguinius seems to like these.
  Sanguinius: "If you truly do hail from the realm that men once called hell, when you return there, tell your kindred it was Sanguinius who threw you back."
  • Also:
  Kyriss: You must love us! We give you blood and hate and you will love us for it!
  Sanguinius: I will take your silence now. (Decapitates him)
• Borrowed Catchphrase: As Deathfire goes on, "Vulkan Lives" is slowly starting to get borrowed from Numeon by his companions, to the extent of becoming the Salamanders' war cry for a while.
• Break the Cutie: For a given value of "cutie", but this is basically what happens to Vulkan. At the hands of Curze, he goes from being the nicest of the Primarchs to a raving maniac, and all that remains of him is his knowledge of combat and desire to murder Curze.
  • Played utterly, terminally straight with Serena D'Angelus in Fulgrim.
  • Mersadie Oliton is also on the receiving end of this, though to a lesser degree.
• Bring News Back: In The Flight of the Eisenstein, Garro and his surviving comrades aboard the eponymous cruiser must cross the galaxy to reach Terra and warn the Imperium of Horus' treachery at Istvaan III.
• Brotherhood of Funny Hats: Exploited. The members of the secret warrior lodges claim (and, for most, genuinely believe) their little clubs are harmless social groups, despite the protestations of more resistant Astartes who see them as an unnecessary and potentially subversive adulteration of the legions' command hierarchy. They're right to be concerned, as it turns out the lodges were a Trojan Horse designed to do precisely what the naysayers feared would happen: turn a seemingly-innocent gathering of friends into a tight-knit in-group who could then be more easily turned against anyone who was deemed to be an "outsider", regardless of rank or friendship, which the lodges' secret code phrases and rituals only helped to reinforce. Some members eventually see what's happening and get out in time, but many more do not, which eases their transition into treason.
• Brown Note:
  • The word of banishing that Navid Murza and later Kasper Hawser used in Prospero Burns causes gums to bleed and teeth to loosen.
  • To a lesser extent, many regular humans find it difficult to be in the presence of or even look at a Primarch (although this reaction varies). One character almost faints when she is alone in a room with both Horus and the Khan.
  • The Emperor himself, for those gifted with psyker sight. He's so powerful that looking at him causes Sensory Overload, and one character has a panic attack even remembering this. It partly bleeds over to the mortal world — most people can't stand looking at the Emperor directly when he's not masquerading. The only people unaffected by this are the Primarchs and Malcador.
• Brutal Honesty: Captain Amit of the Blood Angels' Fifth Company has need for tact. It serves him well, though; his bluntness makes him the only one of the Blood Angels willing to draw the (correct) conclusion that Horus has turned traitor.
• Cain and Abel: Rather than a single case, it's essentially half a fraternity of Physical Gods becoming the Cain to the other half's Abel. There are also specific cases between individual Primarchs. Most notably, Perturabo is the Cain to Dorn's Abel; then there's Russ, the loyalist Cain to Magnus's Abel. Horus and Sanguinius are probably the most tragic case.
• Call-Back: Throughout the series. For example in The First Heretic, Argel Tal, during his trip in the Immaterium with Ingethel, is shown a vision of another event happening elsewhere in the timeline, which is a visit to the labs of Terra as the Primarchs are being grown. This appears to be the same scene that Horus will be subjected to on Davin, forty years later, in False Gods. To make things weirder, both cases implied that the characters were actually there and influencing events, rather than just visions.
• Call-Forward: Tons of them, particularly in the early books. It's like the authors had a standing challenge to include as many Continuity Nods and hints to the Foregone Conclusion per book as they possibly could.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Horus does this to the Emperor and he decides to drag the rest of the galaxy into it for fun.
• Came Back Wrong: Erebus brings back Cyrene with much agonised screaming, and the process makes her a Perpetual.
• The Caper: The short story Serpent Beneath follows Omegon and a handpicked crew trying to destroy a secret Alpha Legion facility experimenting on what looks suspiciously like a Cadian Pylon on an asteroid far from the Cadian system. Destroying the facility would allow the White Scars the opportunity to join the war, but letting it go would compromise the entire program.
• Captured on Purpose: In Deathfire, the Unburdened Xenut Sul lets himself get captured by Ultramarines to infiltrate Macragge and try to kill Barthusa Narek.
• Carry a Big Stick: Horus wields a colossal mace named Worldbreaker.
  • Lorgar's is nothing to sniff at, either. Bonus points because he really does speak softly.
• Cassandra Truth: At least three separate attempts are made to warn others about Horus's impending fall to Chaos. Magnus' attempt destroys the Emperor's Webway project and gets the Space Wolves unleashed on Prospero, Eldrad's attempt gets the Maiden Worlds in the Perdus Anomaly virus-bombed by Fulgrim, and Leman Russ treats Eada Haelfwulf's dying words as Magnus' attempt to fabricate corroborating evidence.
• Catchphrase: For Numeon, "Vulkan Lives!" becomes a personal credo and war cry after Istvaan V.
• The Cavalry:
  • At the end of Know No Fear, when Captain Ventanus and the 4th Company are on the verge of being overwhelmed by Hol Beloth, reinforcements show up, and by reinforcements, we mean the 19th Company under Captain Aethon, the remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies under Sergeant Anchise, three Titans under Tetrarch Tauro Nicodemus, and Army forces under Tetrarch Eikos Lamiad. They are pissed.
  • Subverted in Mechanicum. Although a sizeable force of Imperial Fists lands on Mars in the first hours of the Schism, it turns out that they are here only to evacuate all the materiel they can rescue (power armour, bolter shells and so on) as well as vital members of the Mechanicum. However, they do not wish to attack the Mechanicum for fear of being undermanned when Horus reaches the Sol System and leave Mars in the hands of the Dark Mechanicum for the remainder of the Horus Heresy.
  • During the Battle of Pluto, the Phalanx itself, with Rogal Dorn aboard, comes to the rescue of the Imperial Fists patrols and Archamus' team who were trapped by the Alpha Legion. The Phalanx and its accompanying ships smash the Alpha Legion's fleet and Rogal Dorn is able to kill Alpharius during this battle.
  • In Wolf King, the Vlka Fenryka are saved by a fleet of Dark Angels which helps defeat the Alpha Legion.
  • In Pharos, the Night Lords attack the planet Sotha and the Pharos. The tropes is subverted when a flotilla of Ultramarines and Dark Angels led by Captain Lucretius Corvo tries to make its way to the Pharos and reinforce the defenders, but Barabas Dantioch overloads the Pharos, which kills most of the Night Lords anyway.
  • During the Siege of Terra, the loyalists' hope is to hold out until Roboute Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson arrive with their Legion to crush the traitors from behind. Alas, the interior wall is breached before the loyalists can arrive, which leads to the Emperor teleporting aboard the Vengeful Spirit.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late:
  • A Raven Guard task force arrives at Istvaan V weeks after the Drop Site Massacre, just as Corax and the remaining Raven Guard on the planet are about to be overrun and butchered. They quickly extract the survivors and run for it.
  • Overlapping with You Are Too Late at the Siege of Terra. The Ultramarines, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves finally arrive at Terra with sufficient numbers to decisively turn the tide in favor of the loyalists. By the time they get there, however, most of the traitor primarchs have left or been banished, Horus and Sanguinius are dead, and the Emperor himself is mortally wounded. All that's left for them is to chase the remaining traitors away and start to pick up the pieces of the ruined Imperium.
• Cavalry Betrayal: The Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, one of the most significant and shocking battles of the Horus Heresy. The Raven Guard, Salamanders and Iron Hands were pitted against the Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, Death Guard and World Eaters. The three loyalist legions expected reinforcements from the Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Iron Warriors, and Word Bearers, but these four legions had already joined Horus' side. When the Salamanders and Raven Guard fell back on the new arrivals, they were engulfed in a hurricane of fire that devastated their numbers in moments. The resulting bloodbath resulted in one of the worst defeats for the Imperium. The three loyalist legions were reduced to no more than 22,000 Astartes. Ferrus Manus was killed by Fulgrim, becoming the first primarch to fall on either side, while Vulkan disappeared after the Iron Warriors fired a tactical nuke at him.
• Chicken Walker: The smaller Titan classes count as this.
• Child Soldiers:
  • The Lucifer Blacks had served as soldiers since kids, which is why they're all badass and nearly all gone when the Imperium rediscovers their world and puts an end to the matter.
  • Corvus Corax tried to replenish the ranks of the Raven Guard by recruiting young boys to turn them into Space Marines with improved genetech from the Emperor. However, the Alpha Legion put an end to this operation.
• The Chosen One: Several.
  • The Emperor is sometimes cited as having been destined to rule humanity in the meta sources.
  • Then there's Horus as the Chosen One of the powers of Chaos, reminding us that this trope isn't always a good thing.
  • And there's Lorgar and his Legion as the prophets of Chaos.
• Central Theme:
  • More than anything else, our inner flaws and weaknesses poses a greater threat to our existence and our legacy than any outside menace or trial, and if left unchecked and unresolved it would cast down even the greatest of us and ruin all that is good and bright. The Horus Heresy and the 40K verse in general takes this in a more Space Whale Aesop direction by having the Warp make this threat literal in the form of Daemons and the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, who would plot against the Emperor and orchestrate the Horus Heresy.
  • Deceit and distrust, even made with the best of intentions or reasonable cause, can become more dangerous and destructive than the truth and trust could be. The Emperor's efforts to hide the existence of Chaos ultimately left his sons and the Imperium unprepared and vulnerable to the Ruinous Powers' designs and corruption, as well as sowing mistrust between him and even his most loyal servants and sons with his refusal to come clean with his plans and reasons for his actions, all of which ultimately backfired catastrophically to the detriment of the Imperium and the galaxy.
  • Faith. The series explores the nature of faith, both as a negative and as a positive, all over the place. All the humans have been raised to believe in the Emperor of Mankind and his secular, atheistic, rationalistic, materialistic philosophy called the Imperial Truth. However, the presence of Chaos, and a long look at the Emperor's policies and behavior, cause many to question and reject that worldview. The Horus Heresy is a time when virtually all humanity undergoes a Crisis of Faith, questioning what they've been taught by the authorities (namely the Emperor) and having to decide for themselves what they believe. Some cling to the ideals of the old Imperial Truth. Some turn to the gods of Chaos. Some turn to the nascent-but-growing religion that worships the Emperor as divine.
• Civil War: The Horus Heresy is this on the surface, although it gets much deeper with the overall conflict between the forces of order in the galaxy against the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The Great Crusade has caused many compliant planets to grow resentful of having to obey a distant Emperor, and Horus has promised them greater autonomy in exchange for their loyalty. Horus has thus successfully pushed half of the Mechanicum, several disgrunted Primarchs with their legions, and many worlds of the Imperium to turn to him and fight the loyalists.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Warp is influenced by emotion, belief, and subconscious thought; if enough people believe something will happen, then the Warp tends to make it so. It comes into play in The End and the Death Vol. III, when Euphrati Keeler leads hundreds of thousands of refugees in praying to and for the Emperor; they collectively generate enough psychic resonance to reignite the Astronomican and give the Emperor Himself a Heroic Second Wind in his duel with Horus.
• Co-Dragons:
  • Horus is famously accompanied by a quartet of Sons of Horus captains called the Mournival. Each bearing symbols of the moon at different phases, they are Horus' right-hand men and act as a group of counselors with balanced personalities so that Horus is receiving advice and suggestions that complement each other.
  • Perturabo also kept a trio of Warsmiths named the Trident with him, also using them as counsellors who would speak frankly in his presence. The Trident are also named as such because the legion sometimes adopt a three-pronged formations of columns that each member of the Trident leads.
  • The Emperor's Children had an informal clique of senior captains and other officers who are in Fulgrim's good graces, notably Julius Kaesoron, Lucius, Vespasian, Eidolon, and Fabius Bile.
• Color-Coded Armies: Each of the legions are distinguishable by the color of the armour they wear. For instance, Ultramarines have blue armour while the White Scars have white armour. Moreover, each legion's elite units also tend to wear a distinctive colour scheme.
• Combat by Champion: Used to settle inter-Legion disputes in extremis during the Crusade and after the Heresy. Sigismund and Alajos converse during one such disagreement, anticipating that they will be designated champions for their respective Legions. The Dark Angels and Space Wolves have made a tradition of it, dating back to a campaign where Leman Russ and Lion El'Jonson got into a prolonged brawl after the Lion killed someone that Russ had sworn to kill himself.
  • Also happens on one occasion when the White Scars unexpectedly share a battlefield with the Imperial Fists.
• Combat Pragmatist: Loken, when challenged to a sparring match by Lucius, starts and finishes it by grabbing his sword arm and punching him in the face. He warned Lucius that the match wouldn't just be about the sword.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: For some reason the cover artist made Horus look like Tony Soprano (which is surprisingly fitting if you think about it).
• Compelling Voice:
  • Combined with Trigger Phrase in Prospero Burns. A daemon could hurt a person with magic if it knew the person's name. These names were stolen from Kasper Hawser's mind.
  • As part of John Grammaticus's repertoire as a "logokine", he manages several flavors of this in Legion.
  • Argel Tal uses the language of daemons in Betrayer, forcing an Ultramarine to drop his weapon.
• Computer Virus: In Mechanicum, the Dark Mechanicum spreads a scrapcode (a warp-infested computer virus) across Mars, hacking and corrupting all the pieces of technology it touches. Because of their extensive use of cybernetics and noospheric connections, most of the Mechanicum on Mars was exposed and corrupted to Kelbor-Hal's side. The same tactic appears in Know No Fear and The First Wall, with Chaos-tainted scrapcode used to cripple loyalist noospherics and communications.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Many of the Astartes in the Traitor Legions suffer from this: who first, their Primarch or the Imperium? Jaghatai Khan is also caught between his oaths to the Imperium and his personal friendship with Horus. The Alpha Legion, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be able to make up their mind about who they're really working for. Or so it seems...
• The Conspiracy: The Cabal is an ancient, nebulous organisation of xenos who work to undermine Chaos. Their current goal is to tip the war in Horus' favour so that his side wins but Horus himself destroys humanity out of guilt, depriving Chaos of the emotions humanity provides. They operate in secrecy, having employed human Perpetuals to perform specific actions from spying to assassination during most of human history, and as a result precious few are aware that they even exist.
• Conscription: During the Siege of Terra, the defense is getting so desperate that civilians have to be drafted to be the first line of defense on the ground, as other more "precious" troops would be wasted manning the outer walls.
• The Consigliere: The Mournival is pitched as this to Loken when he is first inducted, being an informal quartet of trusted captains whose job is to give honest, unfiltered advice to the Warmaster, unadulturated by the political biases that can pollute the normal chain of command. Though as he discovers, the Mournival can itself be used as a political tool by the Warmaster.
  Horus: They are a voice of reason in my ear when all around me is confusion. They are as dear to me as my brother Primarchs, and I value their counsel above all others. In them are the humours of choler, phlegm, melancholia, and sanguinity, mixed in exactly the right amount I need to keep me on the side of the angels.
• Continuity Nod: The authors seem to have a contest as to who can put more of these per-book than the others.
  • Prospero Burns: We meet a Space Wolf called Bear. His arm is destroyed by a daemon during the scouring of Prospero and replaced with an augmetic. Shortly thereafter we learn that his name is actually Bjorn, indicating that this is actually Bjorn the Fell-Handed, who would go on to become the most famous Dreadnought and the oldest loyal Space Marine in the 41st millennium. Though becoming a Dreadnought is considered an honor, Bjorn was happy when he only lost an arm instead of being forced to become a Dreadnought. Obviously, his luck didn't hold out.
  • In the Age of Darkness story "Rules of Engagement", an Ultramarine Captain thinks it will take something far greater than traitor assault to destroy the beauty of Prandium. Ironic when you consider it gets eaten by Tyranids.
  • In Nemesis, Siress Callidus wants to deploy a new Callidus assassin to kill Horus. The assassin's name? M'shen, the woman who assassinated Konrad Curze.
  • Virtually all the major Iron Warriors players in Storm of Iron appear in Angel Exterminatus. Only Honsou is missing. The last line of the book is a namedrop to him.
  • In The End and the Death: Volume I, Horus lists off the daemon forces in his service. Alongside the usual suspects such as Skarbrand, N'Kari and so on along with other Daemons from the Heresy, there's a veritable storm of names from other 40K works including Ulkair, Ghargatuloth, Abraxes, M'kar, and Ax'senaea.
  • In the short story The Abyssal Edge, a report from the Thousand Sons complaining about the conduct of the Night Lords is written by one Iskandar Khayon. Similarly, the short story Massacre is essentially "what First Claw did during the Drop Site Massacre".
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Graham McNeill does one against himself. A third of the way through The Outcast Dead we see the Emperor receive the ill-fated psychic warning from Magnus, which leads to the Space Wolves going to Prospero for some smashy-smashy. The book says this takes place after the events of Galaxy in Flames and that Terra is already aware of Horus's treachery. However, both False Gods and A Thousand Sons (both written by McNeill!) explicitly say this happened before the Istvaan III massacre. It later got retconned, rather clumsily, as Magnus delivering his warning (and damaging the webway) to the Emperor within the pre-heresy timeframe but the psychic backlash of the events being contained and finally bursting open two years later, roughly at the same time as the Istvaan Massacre.
  • The Flight of the Eisenstein states that Saul Tarvitz was the First Captain of the Emperor's Children and that Garro could see the oceans of Terra from space. Previous books had established that Tarvitz was never one of Fulgrim's chosen elite, and that those oceans had long since been boiled away by nuclear war. The oceans are back again in Prospero Burns. The idea seems to be be that a few small seas remain or have been restored by terraforming, which is shown in Nemesis.
  • Early books in the series show Sanguinius as "raven haired", when in Fear to Tread, he's suddenly the blonde that he's shown as literally everywhere else. This one is explained away in The Unremembered Empire. Much like the Emperor, some Primarchs, such as Sanguinius, are seen by others in the way that the viewer subconsciously finds most pleasing or suitable (or possibly in the way that the Primarch wants to be seen).
  • Kharn's appearance in Galaxy in Flames has him as his 40K self, a frothing, insane madman, whilst later novels featuring the World Eaters, such as Betrayer, don't have them falling to Khorne until after Angron ascends to daemonhood during his duel with Roboute Guilliman on Nuceria. Later 40K novels portray Kharn similar to his 30K self, making this more of a Characterization Marches On. Possibly justified by the sheer extent of the bloodshed on Isstvan III messing with Khârn's implants, as well as the strain of a grinding, attritional war that has raged for months.
  • Vulkan Lives is internally consistent, but makes absolutely no sense in the face of established Salamanders lore, especially regarding the Tome of Fire. In short, if Vulkan Lives is to be considered the true story, literally everything we know about Forgefather Vulkan He'stan and the Tome of Fire is a lie.
  • In Betrayer, Erebus claims that Kor Phaeron has called for reinforcements against Ultramarine pursuit from the Calth assault. However, this takes place several weeks after the attack on Calth, which Kor Phaeron fled from before the mass counter-attack could begin. Macragge's Honour shows that Kor Phaeron was stranded on Sicarus within the Eye of Terror (far, far away from any Ultramarine counterattack) after his ship was destroyed by the eponymous battleship shortly after fleeing Calth. Even allowing for warp-based shenanigans, the two events don't synch up. Either that or Erebus was lying for his own gain. Again.
  • In Echoes of Eternity, Vulkan must enter the Webway to confront Magnus. Before he goes in, Malcador spends a bunch of time coaching him on what the Labyrinth Dimension will be like, and he reacts with awe when he gets inside. This makes no sense, given that Vulkan spent most of Old Earth on a journey through the Webway– in fact, that's how he got to Terra in the first place– and it was explicitly not his first time then, either; he was already familiar with it, and no longer awed by it, after entering a portal to hunt down some Dark Eldar and stop them raiding Nocturne.
  • Also in Echoes, there's a flashback to Sanguinius meeting his legion for the first time. Abaddon is present, and remarks about the speech Horus gave when he was reunited with the Luna Wolves, discussing it as if he was there. This contradicts several sources, particularly The Solar War from earlier in the Siege series, where Horus is present at Ezekyle's conversion into an Astartes, and it's made clear that the legion has been active with its Primarch for several years at that point.
• Cool Sword: Many.
  • The Kinebrach Anathame, which is a recurring plot device in the early books.
  • The Silver Blade of the Laer, which has a daemon in it.
  • Fulgrim has a taste for these. He originally wielded Fireblade, a sword made by Ferrus Manus. He later used the Silver Blade of the Laer, which he took as a trophy, but that ended poorly, and in the end went to Lucius. And during the Heresy itself, he used the Anathame, which was a gift from Horus. At one point, he briefly owned all three of those swords at one time.
  • For the more mundane types, Thiel's electromagnetic longsword. Capable of shearing Word Bearers in two, cutting through starship hulls, and killing daemons more effectively than any ranged weapon.
  • The Emperor's Sword, which can incinerate an entire daemon army in its owner's hands.
  • The Black Sword, wielded by Sigismund, is a pre-Unification relic blade that can slice through power armor like a superheated knife through butter.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Well into the Heresy, some people within the Loyalist factions begin to suspect that Horus is being manipulated by something, and a much bigger story than the galaxy at civil war is playing out behind the scenes. The Damnation of Pythos is a particularly apt example of this, down to the strange semi-human cultists, reality warping horror, and sealed-away, world-ending, insanity-causing, unknowable beings from beyond the veil.
• Cosmic Plaything: Chaos treats our universe as its plaything.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus:
  • Averted in The Last Church. It's strongly implied that the priest is the last Christian on Terra, who manages to face down the Emperor in a battle of words.
  • Averted also with the Catheric faith, which some Terran veterans somehow still follow.
• Cultural Posturing: There's a certain amount of this among several of the Legions, especially those who recruit primarily from one world. This tends to come from one of two points: the more sophisticated cultures such as Chemos and Macragge, and the less advanced and harder worlds such as Medusa, Fenris and Chogoris.
  • Slobs Versus Snobs also applies at points, especially where the Wolves and Thousand Sons are concerned. Notably inverted during A Thousand Sons however, when Ahriman and Wyrdmake find common ground discussing Shakespire.
  • Averted by the World Eaters and Imperial Fists, who recruit from numerous worlds and therefore don't have a single dominant culture.
• Cultured Warrior: The Emperor's Children take this to the point of arrogance. The Thousand Sons as well—preserving libraries and knowledge (particularly of sorcery, but all subjects are considered important) is a primary goal to the point it brings them into conflict with the Space Wolves, and individual members have hobbies like philosophy and winemaking. Horus and his Mournival also fit the bill pre-corruption. Guilliman actively encourages his senior officers to read things like the plays of Shakespire.
  • The Blood Angels and White Scars also practice fine arts, albeit less ostentatiously than the Emperor's Children. The Blood Angels in particular have a tendency to create beautiful works of art, and then hide them away in their ships instead of displaying them, often because the art depicts the Red Thirst, creative outlets being a way of trying to manage it.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Battle of Gaduare from The Last Church. It was five thousand veteran Thunder Warriors against fifty thousand poorly trained regular humans who were reckless enough to charge out of their defensive position. The result was the first five ranks of charging rebels cut down in seconds and by the end Uriah was the only known survivor of the entire army.
  • The Drop Site Massacre quickly turned into one, as suggested by the name. Eight Legions against three is pretty unfair odds no matter how you slice it.
• Darkest Hour: The Imperium has undoubtedly reached this by the end of The End and the Death: Volume II. Sanguinius, the angelic icon of hope, is dead, and his corpse is being desecrated by daemons; Malcador is losing control of the Golden Throne, and the supply of psykers used to boost him and keep him alive is rapidly running out; the inner sanctum has been breached by traitors and Chaos forces, with colossal Greater Daemons manifesting within walking distance of the throne room; the Astronomican is still dark, preventing The Cavalry from arriving; and Terra itself is being dragged into the Warp, with the entire Solar System beginning to corrupt into something akin to a new Eye of Terror. Perhaps worst of all, while the Emperor giving up His godhood prevented humanity's immediate annihilation, it also left Him weakened at the critical moment before His final confrontation with Horus. Saying that things have never been bleaker would be the understatement of the millennium.
• Dark Messiah: Horus (thanks to Chaotic manipulation) thinks that he is saving the galaxy by turning on the Emperor.
• Dead Man's Switch: In Old Earth, the Emperor finally turns the Golden Throne into one after Vulkan inserts the Talisman of Seven Hammers (that the Emperor himself forged in Nocturne by commanding Vulkan's body) into its mechanism. If the Golden Throne fails or He dies, the Throne will engulf Terra in a roaring inferno, depriving Horus of the planet. He nearly sets it off at the climax of The End and the Death.
• Deadpan Snarker: Many examples. Lorgar is an excellent one, showing this trope when he is very angry with Erebus after Kor Phaeron and Erebus badly screw up the invasion of Calth, turning what should have been the death of the Ultramarines into a stalemate and an Ultramarine strategic victory. Even Angron starts laughing.
• Dead Person Conversation:
  • During Horus' time in the Temple of the Serpent Lodge, he speaks to one of his senior captains who died in the events leading up to Horus Rising. Subverted, because it was Erebus disguised with sorcery, although the readers know this by the time it occurs.
  • Kasper Hawser has a twelve minute conversation with Longfang, in his mind, after the latter's death.
  • Vulkan talks to the ghost of Ferrus Manus while Curze is torturing him, though it's implied that he's hallucinating.
  • In The End and the Death, Volume II, Sanguinius has an extended conversation with Ferrus, whose soul has been wrenched out of the Warp by Horus as a display of his power.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Any deal with Chaos is this. In A Thousand Sons, it is revealed that Magnus made a deal with Tzeentch, believing it to be more benign, but condemning his Legion to serve him in the long run.
  • In The First Heretic, Lorgar makes a deal with a Daemon Princess to lead him to the place where gods and mortals meet.
  • In Vengeful Spirit, Horus makes another deal with the Chaos Gods who empower him but at the price of his soul.
• Death from Above: Long a favored trope of 40K.
  • It is especially prevalent in Know No Fear. As a result of the Campanile hitting the Calth Veridian Yard, the grand cruiser Antrodamicus drops out of low orbit and crashes into the city of Kalkas Fortalice, killing thousands instantly. Then it goes to its Logical Extreme when an orbital depot is destroyed and parked vehicles start falling out into atmosphere—and right above the Ultramarines 6th Company.
  It starts raining main battle tanks.
  • The Word Bearers don't stop there, either. Their fleet proceeds to annihilate Calth's southern hemisphere from orbit, unleashing weapons that scour the continents, boil the oceans, and crack the planet's crust.
  • In Prospero Burns... Prospero burns when Space Wolves bomb it from orbit.
  • During the Siege of Terra, the traitor fleet spends a great deal of time bombarding the absolute hell out of the planet, to the point where the tectonic plates begin to shift.
• Delaying Action: Everything that the garrison on Terra does is aimed at delaying Horus' taking of the Imperial Palace so that the loyalist legions scattered across the galaxy can join the Siege of Terra before it is too late and attack the traitors from behind, which would assure the victory of the Imperium. The Battle of Beta-Garmon and the Solar War are both great examples of this. The first battle takes place at a strategic hub of warp routes to delay Horus' invasion of the Sol system, and the second is a series of void battles where the defenders try to make it so Horus encircles Terra as late as possible.
• Death World: Many planets within the Imperium are utterly inhospitable to life, although it doesn't mean humans haven't managed to survive there. Some of the most famous are Fenris, an ice world where giant creatures roam everywhere; Caliban, whose forests are teeming with Chaos-corrupted monsters; and Baal, whose radioactive wastes are infested with mutants and predators. Not surprisingly, these worlds are perfect recruiting grounds for the Legions, as the average inhabitant of a Death World is sure to be a prime candidate for becoming an Astartes.
• Defensive Feint Trap: In Saturnine, Dorn performs a masterstroke of defense by luring the enemy to the Saturnine Wall, which has a fault line underneath it that the traitors could have exploited to break directly into the Palace. Dorn has kill teams placed there and Arkhan Land fills the fault line with a rapid setting rockcrete. The result is 300 of the most elite Sons of Horus, including the Mournival, Catulan Reavers and the Justaerin being wiped out or buried alive, as well as killing 18,000 Emperor's Children and upsetting Fulgrim to the point where he takes his legion and bails out of the Siege after an unsuccessful assault on the wall itself.
• Deflector Shield: Anything of import has shields to protect it from enemy fire, mostly of the void shield variety. Void shields don't absorb enemy fire, they teleport it into the warp which has the benefit of completely negating damage until the generators are overloaded. In Prospero Burns, Kasper Hawser is given a displacer field, but the description of the device's effect would probably indicate it is really a reductor field. The Imperial Palace is also protected by the Aegis, a masterful system of overlapping void shields that can resist the bombardment of the traitor fleets for months.
• Demonic Possession:
  • Xayver Jubal has the dubious honor of being the first character to be possessed in Horus Rising. His sudden possession and slaughter of Space Marines, then ultimate death is the first contact the Sons of Horus have with Chaos and their first taste of what it feels like to have Space Marines killing each other.
  • Fulgrim acquires a daemon sword on the world Laeran and keeps it. The daemon in the sword continuously influences him and his Legion to further acts of depravity and the Primarch gets ultimately possessed on Isstvan V, his soul trapped in a painting.
  • The Word Bearers perform voluntary possessions through the Gal Vorbak (meaning "blessed sons"). By voluntarily submitting themselves to possession, chosen Space Marines can cohabit with a daemon instead of having their soul destroyed, and they can allow the daemons to temporarily shape their bodies and make them more powerful.
  • In Prospero Burns, Kasper Hawser's actions and memories are altered by a daemon. It is More than Mind Control.
  • Spear, in Nemesis? Not sure as he's not so much possessed as he's wearing a daemon as his skin.
• Depending on the Writer: Carefully averted. So far it has had seven different authors who meet at least once a year to coordinate stories and fuel each others' ideas. The results of this intense collaboration have been impressive, to say the least.
  • The biggest victim is probably, as outlined under Alternate Character Interpretation, the Emperor himself.
  • Lesser examples include:
    • Perturabo (who is either a tortured would-be democratic intellectual, artist, engineer, and diplomat forced into dirty, mud-splattered trench-fighting by his disdainful family until he snaps, even then retaining more of his humanity than the other traitors, or a cold-hearted pragmatist who ordered a tenth of his legion killed moments after meeting them for no discernible reason before developing a "numbers-game" style of calculated attrition that earned his brothers' well-deserved scorn).
    • Fulgrim (who may or may not be demon-possessed, may or may not have seen everything his legion had become with unclouded eyes before losing himself forever, and it goes back and forth).
• Despair Event Horizon: Oftentimes, among them:
  • Fulgrim succumbs to it after killing Ferrus while under daemonic influence, in his despair allowing the daemon to take over completely.
  • Sergeant Thiel briefly gets there when he sees that despite his actions, the Word Bearers are about to succeed at boarding the Macragge's Honour. That is, until Guilliman performs Big Damn Heroes IN SPACE!.
  • The security chief in Fear To Tread, along with most of his planet, reaches it due to Chaos influence on the planet.
  • Millions of loyalist soldiers and civilians collectively hit their event horizon during the Siege of Terra. Some are driven mad, while others desert, commit suicide, or flee for any refuge they can find.
• Deus Exit Machina:
  • During the first hours of the Battle of Calth, Roboute Guilliman is stranded on his flagship's hull when Lorgar summons a daemon that destroys the primary bridge of the Macragge's Honour. It leaves the Ultramarines leaderless for ten crucial hours.
  • When the World Eaters attack the garrison world of Armatura, Angron is buried under rubble for a good chunk of the battle, depriving the Legion of his strength at their most critical hour.
  • When Konrad Curze attacks Ultramar, Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson are teleported away from the planet because of a mysterious xenos device, which saves their lives but also allows Curze several extra moments of rampage.
• Didn't See That Coming: One thing Roboute Guilliman did not foresee was that his orders to cooperate with Lorgar were, in fact, Horus' and Lorgar's attempt at taking down him and his Ultramarines.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Emperor's rebuke of Lorgar proclaiming him as a god was the cause of his fall to Chaos, but The First Heretic shows just what that rebuke entailed: ordering the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia, which exemplified the Word Bearers accomplishments, then ordering Lorgar and the entire Word Bearers legion to kneel before the Emperor, Roboute Guilliman, and Malcador the Sigillite in the city's ruins as they re-pledged themselves to the Great Crusade. Even the other Primarchs thought it was excessive. Is it any wonder that the Word Bearers betrayed the Imperium?
• Distant Finale: Know No Fear has one 25 years later (or over 219,000 hours on the Mark of Calth), after the end of the Heresy, with Captain Ventanus participating in the Exterminatus of Colchis during the Great Scouring.
• Divided We Fall: The Imperium of Man is fighting itself. In this corner, The Emperor and loyalist Primarchs. In the other corner, Horus and the traitor Primarchs. The main theme of Umremembered Empire is that Imperium Secundus and by extension mankind will only survive the Horus Heresy by trusting each other. Ultramar is threatened on several occasions by mistrust between its leaders, but they eventually come around and work together.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Sevatar does not like it when people call him "Jago Sevatarion."
• Don't Look Back: In Wolfsbane, Bjorn is tasked with sitting near a ritual that opens a portal to the Warp, but is forbidden from ever looking back, in the direction of the ritual circle. He hears wild animals, battles, earthquakes and storm, and even the voice of Leman Russ, but holds true to his order.
• Doomed by Canon: Don't get attached to the loyalist characters. Don't get too attached to the traitors, either. Some of their fates are indeed worse than death. The survivors of the books tend to be condemned for their heresy to spend eternity as expensive pieces of plastic.
  • Oddly inverted by Damnation of Pythos. It's hundreds of years late, but^note as revealed in the novel Pandorax The Cavalry does end up finding the heroes' distress call after it gets lost in the bureaucracy, and the Grey Knights arrive to close the daemon portal.
• Doorstopper: The Siege of Terra books are all hefty enough to qualify, especially in hardback, but the crown goes to The End and the Death, which clocks in at a whopping 1,664 pages split across three volumes, each of which is longer on its own than any other novel published by the Black Library that isn't an omnibus collection...and even beats a few of those out too. Author Dan Abnett in his afterword said it was the longest narrative he's ever written in his life.
• Downer Ending:
  • All over the place, given that the series as a whole (and certain events in particular) is a Foregone Conclusion.
  • The first three books of the series focusing on the Luna Wolves and Fulgrim end in the horrifying battle of Istvaan III, where the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, World Eaters and Emperor's Children purge the Imperial loyalists from their ranks. Torgaddon dies, Loken is buried under rubble and left for dead, Saul Tarvitz is betrayed by Lucius and dies, all the Remembrancers aboard the Vengeful Spirit and Pride of the Emperor die horribly.
  • The First Heretic: Lorgar falls to Chaos alongside his Legion. Argel Tal is possessed by a daemon forever, he must kill Aquillon, who is one of his only friends, and Cyrene dies.
  • A Thousand Sons: The Thousand Sons are almost annihilated by the Space Wolves and must flee to the Planet of Sorcerers, where they'll eventually swear allegiance to Tzeentch. The Imperial Palace's Webway Gate is damaged for good, ruining the Imperium's future. Overall the book ends on a horrible waste of lives.
  • Damnation of Pythos: The Bad Guy Wins and the distress call the heroes send out ends up filed under "Cassandra Truth".
  • The series as a whole ends with this: the Emperor does kill Horus, but is mortally wounded and confined to the Golden Throne in the aftermath. Guilliman, Russ and the Lion arrive too late. The last desperate hope for any kind of peaceful resolution to the carnage dies when Erebus stabs Loken in the back. And though it isn't the victory the Chaos gods were planning for, the Imperium is irrevocably damaged and begins its slow slide toward the nightmarish dystopia of the 41st millennium, an outcome pleasing to them regardless.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • There are many occasions in the first few books when the characters consider scenarios like Astartes fighting Astartes or Horus trying to take a fortress defended by Rogal Dorn before dismissing them as impossible.
  • The end of Fallen Angels shows the Lion innocently handing over some Ordinatus engines that he just kept out of Horus' hands to Perturabo.
  • Nathaniel Garro would have died on Isstvan Extremis if Fabius Bile hadn't administered emergency medical treatment. Doubtless Bile would have ignored Garro (or put a surreptitious bolt in his head) had he any inkling of how much trouble he would be.
  • In The First Wall, both Perturabo and Rogal Dorn commit a lot of troops to the Lion's Gate spaceport, tasking one of their subordinates to do the job because both fear the Lion's Gate is being used as a distraction for something else, despite neither of them having any particular intentions vis a vis the spaceport in the first place.
  • In The Unremembered Empire, while Guilliman is pondering how his importance to the war as a Primarch prevents his urge to take up the Call to Agriculture, he muses that "no common farmer would play a role in the final battle against Horus." He is, of course, unaware of Ollanius Pius, whose journey toward that final battle began with him as a common agri-worker on Calth.
• Dramatic Spine Injury: The enmity between the Space Wolves and Thousand Sons explodes into outright violence when the Space Wolves are dispatched to bring down the Thousand Sons after Magnus the Red's disastrously failed attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' treachery. While the two legions engage each other, a massive fight ensues between Magnus and Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves; they inflict serious injuries on each other, but Russ finally overpowers Magnus and breaks his back over his knee. However, Magnus uses Warp sorcery to remove himself and the surviving Thousand Sons from the battlefield before Russ can finally kill him.
• Dramatis Personae: Every book has one or two pages listing the main and peripheral characters. Thankfully, they don't spoil much.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: One of Horus's visions in the Serpent Lodge is the Emperor of Mankind being worshiped as a god and him and his brothers being forgotten, which starts off a nice Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
• Dreaming the Truth: Dreaming of Things to Come.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Fulgrim nearly does this. What he actually does is much, much worse.
  • Karkasy's assassination in False Gods is covered up as a suicide.
  • Poor Serena D'Angelus winds up killing herself after finding the corpse of her friend Ostian Delafour and realizing how far she'd fallen into debauchery and corruption.
  • Mersadie Oliton throws herself into the reactor core of the Phalanx after discovering that the daemon prince Samus possessed her and used her as a gateway to invade the station.
• Driven to Villainy: Magnus actually tries to warn the Emperor about the Heresy, but he disbelieves him and sends Leman Russ to imprison his Legion. Horus changes the orders from "arrest" to "kill", and Magnus has to pledge loyalty to Tzeentch to save his sons from annihilation. He doesn't join the party until the Siege of Terra, though.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Space Wolves have a tradition of honoring those who died by passing down oral stories of warriors' lives. Well respected warriors receive a big "sending" or feast, in which a skjald or a good storyteller recites all the deeds of the fallen warrior.
• Dying as Yourself: Eugen Temba in False Gods manages to overcome Nurgle's influence before his death.
  • In Path of Heaven, Cario accepts his death at Shiban's hands to prevent himself from being possessed by a daemon.
  • In The Buried Dagger, Macer Varren blows himself up with a belt of grenades rather than allow himself to be possessed by the Lord of Flies.
  • In The End and the Death, Vol. II, Ollanius Pius convinces the Emperor that it would be better to die fighting Horus as himself rather than win as the Chaos god he's on the verge of becoming, since humanity would be screwed if that happened.

E-M

• Early-Installment Weirdness: As a result of the series being in print for more than a decade and a half, and the main lore of 40K seeing some changes due to moving between editions, some names and terms suddenly shift midway through the series to reflect the updated lore, such as switching from "Eldar" to "Aeldari".
  • A more minor example: the term "Space Marine" is used very rarely for the first ten or so books. They are always referred to as "Legiones Astartes" or just "Astartes", likely to fit with the feel of the "ancient historical" setting. Once the Calth arc kicks into gear, though, you're just as likely to hear them referred to as either term interchangeably.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Politically and culturally, Terra is the most significant planet of the Imperium. It is the capital of the Imperium, where the Emperor started his Great Crusade, built the Imperial Palace, and where the Council of Terra governs the Imperium. It is also the site of the Astronomican, the psychic beacon that allows the people of the Imperium to navigate through the Warp. Finally, it is the cradle of humankind, and all cultures of any planet inhabited by humans are derived from the cultures of Terran colonists. Everybody knows that whoever holds Terra is the one who will hold the galaxy and thus prepares accordingly in anticipation of the Siege of Terra, where the fate of the Imperium will be decided.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Mersadie Oliton takes a good long look at a nearly-nude Garviel Loken in Horus Rising. She also apparently collects pictures of him in various states of undress.
• Eldritch Location: Anywhere in the Eye of Terror or saturated with the Warp, as per usual. Two milder but stranger examples include the Pharos of Sotha and the Webway.
  • The interior of the Pharos occasionally doesn't match up to its outside physical proportions and the interior doesn't seem to have been designed for access by creatures that used just 3 dimensions, not to mention the contradictory sensor readings, odd dreams it causes, and future echos.
  • The Webway is alien in more abstract ways, being lit by no discernible source, gravity being applied purely by what's being walked on and not by what is down, and impossibly deep drops from it's walkways. One analysis by the Mechanicum states that someone falling off the edge would die of old age before the hit the bottom, if there was one.
  • Terra itself becomes one in the latter stages of the Siege, as the Warp soaks into the planet and starts twisting and corrupting it.
• Elite Army: The Space Marines are the purest example of this, but there are many others in the Emperor's forces.
  • The Army regiments of the Terran Old Hundred fought during the Unification of Terra, and every one of them has been waging war for two centuries since then.
  • The Solar Auxilia are noted as being some of the best mortal troops in the galaxy, particularly in void warfare.
  • Then there are the Skitarii of the Mechanicum: highly augmented crack troops.
• The Emperor: The Emperor shows up all over the place, although any given appearance is typically very limited. At least in this series one can see him in action.
• Emperor Scientist: "Emperor Everything", really, but he's this trope especially as a talented genetic engineer and the creator of the Thunder Warriors, Custodes, Astartes, and Primarchs.
• Empowered Badass Normal: John Grammaticus is a human secret agent working for the Cabal. He's a synthetic Perpetual, and has been augmented and trained to the point that he can drive his bare hand through armour, and is a high-functioning logokine (He's the first and only kind of psyker of this type that we've met in the 40k 'verse; and while it seems like a logokine's trademark would be influencing others through speech, John's ability is versatile enough to be a wildcard).
• The Empire: The Imperium of Humanity can be considered to be at its peak just before the Horus Heresy. It has successfully conquered most of the galaxy and is the dominant military force thanks to the Legiones Astartes and its vast number of Imperial Army regiments. The Emperor has also supplanted most cultures with the Imperial Truth, ushering in a new golden age of secular culture, and His cult of personality is so powerful it is evolving into a religion (despite His own hatred of religion).
• The Ending Changes Everything: In the Caliban half of Fallen Angels, Zahariel discovers at the last second that the Terran sorcerers were trying to banish the warp taint, not bring it to the surface as Luther had led him to believe.
• End of an Era: The Horus Heresy marks the end of the Imperium's golden age of expansion, progress, and secular enlightenment. The treachery of the Emperor's most beloved son, the exposure to Chaos at the same time as the beginning of the rise of the Imperial Faith will turn the Imperium into a fundamentally distrustful state who doesn't believe anymore that humanity will prevail, or any inherent belief in the good of man.
  Prologue of every Horus Heresy book: The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended. The Age of Darkness has begun.
• Epic Fail: Sometimes, the greatest obstacle in the villain's path is the villain himself.
  • In Fear To Tread, Ka'Bandha's plan is to confront the Blood Angels with his armies and amp up the Angels' tendency for Unstoppable Rage to the point that they'll do a Face–Heel Turn and start serving Khorne. He apparently missed the memo that Unstoppable Rage is, well, unstoppable, and the infuriated Angels overrun his armies and get him killed before he's able to corrupt them.
  • In Vulkan Lives, Curze has Vulkan run through an ever-changing maze for the former's amusement, with the promised prize being a hammer with a built-in teleporter. Upon Vulkan finding the hammer, Curze shows up right in front of him to gloat about how the maze has anti-teleportation shields, and his teleporter is useless. Vulkan's response?
  You forgot about one thing, Konrad... It's also a hammer.
  • In Deathfire, the ship that the main characters are travelling on is infested by a gang of daemons which take the form of little girls to lure people into close quarters, whereupon they eviscerate them. On their hit list is a pair of Techmarines repairing an airless, zero-g area between two layers of the hull. Some time into the incursion, the main characters meet with the Techmarines, and the conversation goes something like this:
  Numeon: There are daemons on the ship. They look like...
  Techmarine 1: Children, we know. We've shot one.
  Techmarine 2: We have realized there's something off when we saw it floating and talking to us without a void suit.
• Equivalent Exchange: How Deathfire-based resurrection works, apparently. Vulkan doesn't come back to life and sanity until Numeon sacrifices himself. Life for life, it seems.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In Nemesis, Horus Lupercal forbids Erebus from employing any further assassins against the Emperor, as he considers assassins to be the tools of cowards and that the Heresy must end with Horus killing the Emperor himself.
  • When the Night Lords discover that the Word Bearers have been deliberately allowing some of their number to become hosts to daemons, they refuse to let the Word Bearers anywhere near them.
  • In Angel Exterminatus, when the Iron Warriors witness just how depraved and insane the Emperor's Children have become, they're not just unnerved, they're outright disgusted. Then they find out what Fabius Bile has been up to in his spare time. Even people who spent their last pre-Heresy engagement committing genocide on their home planet consider Bile's horrific surgeries on Space Marines to be over the line.
  • Surprisingly, the Emperor's Children still have some standards when Lucius tells them that Fulgrim has been possessed by a daemon, and they resolve to free their Primarch. Granted, it was partly because they wanted to enjoy the sensation of fighting (and later, torturing) a Primarch, but it's pretty clear that Lucius, Marius Vairosean, Julius Kaesoron and Fabius Bile are motivated out of genuine loyalty to Fulgrim.
  • An ambiguous case with Fulgrim himself because of the daemon possessing him. It's implied that he engaged in necrophilia with the corpse of a female remembrancer at the end of Fulgrim.
• Evil Chancellor: Cypher may have been this for Luther. As with everything regarding Cypher, it's ambiguous.
  • Erebus and Kor Phaeron are Lorgar's closest and most trusted advisors. Kor Phaeron, his adopted father on Colchis, secretly kept the old religion alive and taught it to the Davinites while Lorgar was spreading the cult of the God-Emperor. That religion was an interpretation of the Chaos Gods. Erebus, also a follower of the Ruinous Powers, spread their knowledge and promises of power to the other legions through the warrior-lodge system and set the Heresy in motion.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • The Traitor Legions to the Loyalists.
  • The barely-seen Brotherhood (normal humans in STC versions of Astartes equipment defending a peaceful non-Imperial system) in False Gods to the Astartes in general.
  • The Space Wolves have the World Eaters as an evil counterpart, though their nemeses are the Thousand Sons, who are completely opposite.
  • The Iron Warriors are the evil counterpart to the Imperial Fists; both legions specialize in siege warfare and engineering, and put their skills to work against each other during the Siege of Terra.
• Evil Former Friend: Basically what the whole series is about:
  • During the Great Crusade, Horus and Sanguinius were closer than any other Primarch. Anyone familiar with 40K's backstory is well-aware of how that turns out.
  • Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus are said to be two of the closest Primarchs - they forged each other's weapons and both sought perfection in their own way. When Ferrus refuses to turn traitor when Fulgrim reveals his treachery, it turns into a fight. When the Heresy begins, Ferrus becomes the first Primarch killed, and Fulgrim is holding the sword that did it.
• Evil Weapon: Damn it, Fulgrim, a talking sword is not a good thing. Ask Elric of Melniboné.
• Eye Motifs: The Eye of Horus, apart from being the series' logo, is also the official symbol of the Sons of Horus, and Sigil Spammed onto everything connected to the Warmaster.
• Fake-Out Opening: The first line of the first book is, I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor. Wrong Emperor, it turns out.
• False Flag Operation: Lucius and Solomon Demeter kill a bunch of Emperor's Children on Isstvan III in Fulgrim. Lucius reveals that it was a feint and he got Demeter to kill his own men so Lucius could rejoin the legion.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The Imperium uses warp jumps to travel through the galaxy. Basically, they open a temporary warp rift for ships to go through, entering the warp in which a Navigator will guide the ship through the warp toward the ship's destination. However, they are many more subtleties to warp jumps than at face value. First off, the planets and star's gravitational pull can affect the opening of a warp rift, and thus ships must go far away enough from any solar system toward a "Mandeville point" to be able to jump safely. Moreover, it is revealed that that the warp has an everchanging network of currents subjected to tides, storms and so on like a very complicated ocean, with also layers of currents that become more dangerous the further into the warp they go but also are faster to navigate through. Over the course of the series, humanity increasingly learns that (as well as why) Hyperspace Is a Scary Place.
• A Father to His Men:
  • Every primarch to their legion, both figuratively and literally, up until half of them go rogue, anyway. Then it gets a bit less pleasant.
  • Averted figuratively with Perturabo, as The Crimson Fist novella in Shadows of Treachery indicates that Perturabo was killing Iron Warriors who had failed him even before the Heresy began. His first act as Primarch of his legion was to order their decimation (i.e., one in ten men was beaten to death by the other nine) for failing to meet his standards.
  • Even after the Heresy starts, Lorgar still valued the lives of his Word Bearers. He almost gets killed trying to save the Gal Vorbak from Corax and the Raven Guard. However, it's also revealed that he had had Loyalist elements of the Word Bearers purged after the legion as a whole had turned against the Emperor. In addition, the Word Bearers' attack on Calth had another purpose; namely, the culling of those elements of the legion that Lorgar deemed incompetent or too uncontrollable.
• The Federation: The Interex come off as this compared to the Imperium, which is already showing signs of being The Empire. They're a highly technologically advanced society similar to the Tau who cherish peace and are willing to extend the hand of friendship to aliens; not only is their society literally built on a centuries old alliance with a once-dying alien race called the Kinebrach, they defeated the disturbingly Tyranid-like Megarachnids and chose to simply strip them of space-faring capabilities and imprison them on an otherwise uninhabited world around which they posted warning beacons, as opposed to simply massacring them. They also maintain friendly relations with the Eldar, who taught them about Chaos. One Interex character, when questioned about this, proclaims that they had no right to annihilate another species just because it was different. Furthermore, they are well aware of the dangers of Chaos and regard it rationally and openly as a threat that must be opposed by all sentient beings. In fact, they are hesitant to embrace the Imperium because they see its brutal, war-like ways and fear it is already tainted by Chaos (one Interex character refers to the Chaos god Khorne in all but name). Naturally, they are plunged into war with the Imperium and utterly destroyed by it.
• Feed It a Bomb: The Alpha Legion agent Myzmadra manages to heavily wound a war mutant by feeding it a grenade during the first battle in The Lost and Damned. It doesn't kill it immediately, but leaves it vulnerable enough for Katsuhiro to finish the job.
• The Fettered: Because of the Edict of Nikaea, every loyalist Librarian (psychic Space Marine) is supposed to be this. Since some of Horus's worst weapons are psychic in nature, it's a nasty self-inflicted wound for the Imperium. Several of the loyalist primarchs recognize this and opt to let their Librarians off the chain again.
• Fiery Redhead: Leman Russ, Magnus the Red, and especially Angron. For Russ and Angron, their roaring berserker legacy lives on in their respective legions even 10,000 years later.
• Fire-Forged Friends: The best way to get Astartes of different Legions to bond is to have them kill people together. Aww.
• First-Episode Resurrection: The perpetuals being gifted with Resurrective Immortality, it happens:
  • Vulkan's arc starts when he's killed and comes back to life, to the bafflement of his traitor brothers. Konrad proceeds to turn his life into a living hell to find out how to kill him for good, so Vulkan keeps on dying and coming back.
  • During the Battle of Calth, Oll Persson is trying to be your regular Citizen Joe until he gets drowned by a tidal wave caused by the Word Bearers' orbital bombardment and John Grammaticus uses the opportunity to give him a quest, outing Oll to the readers as none other than Ollanius Pius.
• First-Name Basis: The Astartes were friendly during the Great Crusade; some of them were, anyway.
• Five Rounds Rapid: quoted as a Shout-Out in Fallen Angels, used in spirit in a number of other places, usually when a loyalist legion first faces Chaos-based nasties.
• Flashback to Catchphrase: The series shows some of the several iconic phrases of the 41st Millennium being spoken for the first time:
  • In Galaxy in Flames, Horus orders the Vengeful Spirit to open fire on Isstvan III to start the firestorm phase of the virus bombing with the words that started the Horus Heresy, and which Abaddon would use to start the Black Crusades: "Let the galaxy burn!"
  • In The First Heretic First Captain Sevatar of the Night Lords become the first to utter the phrase "Death to the False Emperor!", the Battle Cry that followers of Chaos have been using for ten thousand years.
  • "The Emperor Protects" makes its first appearance with the Lectitio Divinitatus cult. Ten thousand years later, it's become a standard Imperial benediction.
• Foregone Conclusion: Virtually every single major event in the entire series: those with some knowledge of the lore will know how the Heresy is going to end, which major figures will become traitors or loyalists, and who will die. The selling point of the series is like that for classical tragedies: the characterization of those historical figures who had previously been relatively one-dimensional characters, most notably the Primarchs. Moreover, the books often circumvent this problem by focusing on new characters whose fate is unknown.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: By the end of the march on Terra, the Sons of Horus have added tens of thousands of "newborn" to their ranks, with many of these taken from worlds other than Cthonia. These recruits often display a marked reverence for the culture of their new Legion, mimicking lots of Cthonian customs and making a point of speaking the language.
• Forced to Watch: One of the ways in which Curze tortures Vulkan - he ties him next to twenty other deafened, blinded people in front of a giant, deliciously smelling feast, and has Vulkan watch them die a slow death of hunger.
• Foreshadowing: Starts as early as the first chapter of Horus Rising, when the black-armored Justaerin Terminators of the Luna Wolves make their first appearance. Even more so because these particular Terminators are part of the First Company, commanded by none other than Abaddon. Yes. That Abaddon.
  As if they belonged to some other, black Legion
  • "I was there when Horus slew the Emperor" started out as a joke one Luna Wolves captain used to tell; the "emperor" in question being the ruler of a world cut off from the rest of the galaxy who had named himself as the Emperor of Mankind. Horus killed him, hence the joke. Horus, of course, kills the actual Emperor of Mankind at the climax of the series.
  • Near the end of "The Wolf of Ash and Fire", the Emperor annihilates an Ork Warboss using his psychic might. Horus mentally notes that it has destroyed him utterly, including his soul. Horus himself will fall victim to this same attack during their final duel on the Vengeful Spirit.
  • In the short story The Lightning Tower (written by Dan Abnett), Malcador performs a tarot reading for Dorn, part of which is "the Dark King askew across the Emperor". In The End and the Death, also written by Abnett, it's revealed that the Emperor is at risk of becoming the Dark King, a fifth Chaos God.
  • In the The Burning of Ohmn-Mat PDF supplement for the tabletop game, a list of Aetheric Dominions for the Daemons of Chaos is given, rather curiously eight rather than the traditional five or six. While most of them map to the familiar Chaos powers (Heedless Slaughter to Khorne, Rapturous Sensation to Slaanesh, Infernal Tempest to Tzeentch, Putrid Corruption to Nurgle, Ravenous Dissolution to Malal/Malice), three new ones are included, with Samus's Aetheric Dominion changed from his Khornate alignment in the previous edition to the new Encroaching Ruin. In The End and the Death: Volume I, Samus is strongly suggested to be the herald of the Dark King, who corresponds to Encroaching Ruin as "the end and the death".
• A Form You Are Comfortable With:
  • The daemon in Prospero Burns says that its true form would drive Kasper Hawser mad, so it uses Horus, Amon of the Thousand Sons, and Navid Murza's forms instead. Strangely, it had planned on killing Kasper anyway, but it wanted to give its favorite pawn a painless death.
  • The Big E appears in various humble guises, as his true form of an Ambiguously Brown man in golden glowing masterwork Powered Armor is one of such masculine perfection that people either cream their jeans hard enough to brain damage themselves or fall to their knees in worship. Even this may be a pyschic projection, as blanks like the Sisters of Silence see an ordinary man.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Mournival was designed with this idea: to provide Horus with advice from a spectrum of temperaments. As constituted at the beginning of the series, Abaddon is the Choleric, Torgaddon is the Sanguine, Horus Aximand is the Melancholy, and Garviel Loken is the Phlegmatic.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Lorgar, instigator of the Horus Heresy, went over to Chaos after a violent and humiliating rebuke from the Emperor himself who disapproved of Lorgar worshipping him as a god. As a result, Lorgar had a crisis of faith, and Kor Phaeron took the opportunity to teach him about the Chaos gods.
  • On his home planet of Nuceria, Angron was leading a gladiator rebellion and took an oath to die with his companions. The Emperor proceeded to abduct Angron right before the battle in which his fellow gladiators were massacred, leaving Angron as the sole survivor. Angron hated the Emperor from that moment on, and his rage and bitterness at being denied an honorable death alongside his chosen brothers and sisters eventually led him to Khorne.
  • Ahriman was terrified of the XV Legion being killed by mutations ever since his brother died from them.
• A Friend in Need:
  • Russ tries to invoke the trope in Jaghatai when he and the Rout are under attack by the Alpha Legion at the Alaxxes Nebula, but the Khan isn't sure what's going on and leaves for Prospero to find out.
  • Invoked by Jaghatai when he tells Horus that he'll come whenever the Warmaster needs him. He ends up breaking this vow after finding out that it's Horus who went traitor.
  • When Angron is buried under nearly fifty metres of rubble, Lorgar teleports to his position and proceeds to dig him out while under constant fire. This begins the two's Odd Friendship.
• Friendly Sniper: Tarkan and Pergellen, both Iron Hands, showing just how different things were before the Horus Heresy.
• Friend or Foe?: At the beginning of the Horus Heresy, the loyalists are easily taken by surprise by traitor marines pretending to be allies. This leads to thousands of deaths before the loyalists can understand who to trust.
• From a Single Cell: A gift of all Perpetuals. Vulkan and Oll Perrson present this particular skill in the view of the reader:
  • Persson is blown apart by one of many pieces of debris that hit Calth and wakes up a few hours later after a friendly spectral visit from John Grammaticus.
  • Vulkan is immolated by falling into Macragge's atmosphere after his teleporter doesn't work quite as planned and resurrects on the surface, albeit now he's crazy.
• From Bad to Worse: A side-revelation in Mechanicum. Forget Chaos for a moment. Those puny bastards have only been around for a few tens of thousands of years. Sol, the heart of the Imperium and cradle of humanity, is home to the Void Dragon, a C'tan star god that could eat the Sun if it woke up on Mars. It gets worse - the Void Dragon is the Machine God that the Mechanicum, essentially humanity's technological backbone, unknowingly worships, and its primary aspect is complete control over technology. The God-Emperor who beat it up in the past is now on life support, so even if he wasn't getting played all along by a nearly all-powerful, billions of years old God, he can't do a thing to stop it now. The method of keeping the Void Dragon sealed is probably lost forever because one of the party in Mechanicum stole the book needed to teach the Dragon's next keeper what he needs to know to do the job. Generally, people figure Zouche was the Deceiver in disguise. All of this is a back burner problem.
  • The entire final third of The Damnation of Pythos consists of things getting worse and worse for the surviving Marines, for as long as there are surviving Marines, anyway. Losing their only way off the Death World feels pretty disastrous early on; then it turns out to have been, at best, a prologue to the shit that is actually about to go down.
• Future Imperfect: An amusing example in Unremembered Empire - it turns out that in M30 Shakespeare is known as Shakespire, Hamlet got mistranslated as Amulet, and the remembrancers have recently rediscovered his third play.
• Gainax Ending: The ending of Prospero Burns takes place in Kasper Hawser's dream while he is in stasis next to the Dreadnoughts. It is an altered memory where Russ is talking to him the in place of another character, with his words coming from a possibly nonexistent conversation about his imprisonment, with the context such that it takes place both before and after the Burning of Prospero. Hawser happily runs into a forest full of "wolves" right as the book ends.
• Genius Loci: Several worlds in the Signus system are given rudimentary, malevolent sentience as part of Horus and Erebus' plan to corrupt the Blood Angels.
• Genuine Human Hide: We are contractually obligated to remind you that Chief Apothecary Fabius of the Emperor's Children has in his possession a lab coat made of human skin. It makes its first appearance in The Reflection Crack'd, where it's revealed to be made from the skin of loyalist legionaries slain during the Drop Site Massacre. Amazing though it may seem, the Emperor's Children manage to get even worse by The Damnation of Pythos, in which the Iron Hands find themselves fighting their way through a corridor hung with banners of silk and human skin, standing on a carpet made from human flesh and hair; any of it that survived their passage didn't survive the planet they directed the ship to crash into.
  • The Night Lords often wear the results of their flaying work.
  • In Know No Fear, it's mentioned that Lorgar is having copies of the Book of Lorgar prepared for each of his brothers. Horus' set is being bound in the skin of loyalist Astartes killed at the Drop Site Massacre.
• Ghost Planet: There are a great many in this galaxy.
• God-Emperor: Constantly talked about, rarely featured directly. When he makes an appearance, it's often an eerie yet awe inspiring experience for those involved.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Siege of Terra. From its beginning in the War Within The Webway up to the final eight novels of the series, virtually every time the battle for Terra is given focus, the Imperium is forced to cross a new line to maintain control of the situation.
  • The initial part of the conflict sees the Custodes and Sisters of Silence (the Imperium's special forces) deployed as foot soldiers, immediately telling the audience what the stakes are.
  • In an effort to halt the forces of Chaos, the Imperium initiates its very first sacrifice of psykers to the Golden Throne, just so the Emperor can force off the enemy and draw a line in the sand.
  • Part of the reason Dorn deploys most of the Imperial Titan Legions to Beta Garmon is to avoid crossing this threshold on Terra, because a full scale Titan war could destroy the planet.
  • The Emperor has Vulkan rig a dead-man's switch to blow up Terra if Horus wins, just to deny the Dark Gods their prize.
  • Warhawk reveals that the Martyrdom Culture of the Imperium (and its obsession with skulls) started with the Siege, when desperate refugees were mustered to fight in Suicide Missions against Chaos forces because the refugee camps didn't have enough supplies to sustain everyone.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: In The End and the Death, Dorn teleports onto the Vengeful Spirit with the Emperor, the Blood Angels and a retinue of Imperial Fists. Thanks to the Warp, he ends up alone in an endless Sea of Sand littered with the corpses of countless Imperial Fists as well as great walls. Dorn endures the isolation for what feels like centuries to him and slowly but surely goes mad, losing his memory, sense of identity, and having his smallest weaknesses turning against him. It is revealed that he was resentful of and worn out by the pressure of having to organize and mastermind Terra's defenses, and that he desperately wanted to just go out and kill traitors. That sentiment is twisted into a longing to spill blood for Khorne.
• The Good Chancellor: Malcador the Sigillite, mentioned in passing in game materials, finally appears here. The Emperor's right-hand man, he plots on a level that would make Lord Vetinari jealous, while holding everything together day-to-day.
• Good is Not Nice: Barthusa Narek. Word Bearer and loyal devotee of the God-Emperor. He still took part in the Drop Site Massacre at Istvaan V and only defected after seeing how far his Legion had fallen. Now his only goal is to kill Lorgar and save the soul of his once great Legion. However none of that makes him your friend if you are a loyalist. Get in his way and he will kill you, as Vulkan found out in The Unremembered Empire.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Zigzagged. Some villains receive sinister and grotesque scars, but then so do some heroes. Khârn averts the villainous scars, still having "his own face."
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Vulkan's Healing Factor is so extreme that it makes him functionally immortal... which the Night Haunter tries to use to break him.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In Horus Rising, Loken tells Ignace Karkasy to tell the truth, no matter how ugly and horrible it is. By False Gods, Karkasy is still telling the truth, as ugly and horrible as it is, by slandering the Imperium and supporting an outlawed cult. Horus has Karkasy killed for it.
  • In Fear to Tread The Plan to turn the Blood Angels to the side of Chaos by unleashing the Red Thirst in the middle of a battle with Chaos daemons ends with the Blood Angels unleashing a Curb-Stomp Battle on the daemons and giving Sanguinius time to recover from a Mind Rape and kill the Bloodthirster and Keeper of Secrets leading the daemons. Well thought out plan all round.
• Good Versus Good:
  • The Burning of Prospero. Really, during the start of it, it was one loyalist legion against another loyalist legion. One deliberately manipulated to wipe out another, and one deliberately manipulated by deceit and using their overconfidence in using now-outlawed techniques. While it damaged the Wolves, it was the point that tipped the Sons into becoming traitors just to survive.
  • The war between the Interex and the Luna Wolves. It cannot get any more tragic than that. The Interex mistakenly believe the Imperium to be Chaos worshippers and attacks Horus' Legion without even trying to discuss the situation. Horus wants nothing more than to peacefully subjugate the Interex and perhaps even prove that not all xenos are hostile, but he immediately retaliates for the perceived betrayal.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Horus, Perturabo, Mortarion and of course, Slaaneshi Daemons and Fulgrim. Those primarchs can be jealous of each other and their father.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Curze uses Azkaellon as a blunt weapon when duelling Sanguinus.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In Flight of the Eisenstein, after Kaleb activates the blast shields to protect Garro and company from the Life-Eater virus, one of Grulgor's men, Mokyr, tries to escape after them. Unfortunately, he only manages to get his upper torso past the closing door, and ends up getting cut in half by it.
• Hated by All:
  • The Imperial Army forces aren't happy to see the Space Wolves in Prospero Burns. It's so bad that Russ is actually starting a complete change in operational policy... which in turn leads to the "nice and friendly" image of the Wolves we know from 40K.
  • The World Eaters' rep is far worse, however, as they're liable to start killing their own allies before the battle is even won. If the Army hears the XII are on their way they start begging for someone else to come and help them.
• Hearing Voices: Don't listen.
  • In the Webway during Master of Mankind, Baroness Jaya hears the voices of people she used to know.
  • When he's being tortured by Konrad Curze, Vulkan often hallucinates Ferrus Manus talking to him.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Some battles have participants (usually main protagonists and antagonists) take part without their helmets.
  • Many main characters choose to eschew a helmet, in spite of the protection it provides. Some of the most notable offenders are Kor Phaeron, Abaddon, and most primarchs.
  • Most Space Wolves tend to go without. On one side of the argument is that it stifles their senses which they rely on more than other Legions. The other side of the argument is that they're too aggressive to bother. This lead to quite a few deaths that might have been prevented during the Burning of Prospero, as the Thousand Sons were more than wise enough to exploit this.
• Heel Realization: Fulgrim, leading to his Despair Event Horizon. Sadly, it doesn't take.
  • Horus famously has one at the end of his duel with the Emperor, realizing that he's been a pawn of Chaos this entire time and he's destroyed everything that he and the Emperor worked so hard to build.
• Heroic BSoD: The Traitor Legions are counting on this as part of their strategy, knowing that the shock of betrayal will leave the loyalists at less than 100%. It works spectacularly with a lot of rank and file Astartes and more than a few captains. The Primarchs on the other hand...not so much.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Lots and lots and lots. Many an Astartes sacrifices themselves to ensure success of their mission, save their brothers and so on.
• Heroic Second Wind: Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro receives one when being strangled in the grip of a jorgall hybrid, imagining the Emperor's cupped palm holding and watching over Terra, which gives him the strength to fight back and avoid being crushed to death.
  • In The End and the Death Vol. III the Emperor gets several in quick succession during his duel with Horus.; first he siphons off some of Horus' power to restore himself, then he's supercharged by the prayers of his faithful on Terra, giving him the last push he needs to defeat the Warmaster.
• Hero Killer: The Space Wolves are the Emperor's weapon of last resort: a Legion designed to kill another Legion.
  • It's been strongly implied that they were responsible for the "erasure" of the II and XI Legiones Astartes from Imperial history, and this is why the Emperor selected them to take Magnus the Red into custody for breaking the Edict of Nikaea. When Horus changed the order from "arrest" to "kill", the Wolves didn't question the change in orders because it's what they were made for. They would do it all again without a moment's hesitation.
  Kasper Hawser: The unprecedented. Like... Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being called to sanction another legion?
  Leman Russ: That? Hjolda, no. That's not unprecedented.
  • The censure of the World Eaters that comes up in Betrayer could also qualify. Angron mentions that he never figured out why Leman Russ is considered to be the Emperor's executioner. Some of the material that has come out since Prospero Burns has implied that the Emperor did not bestow the title of "executioner" upon the Space Wolves, but that they took the title and job upon themselves to give their Legion a "role" in the future, after the galaxy was fully conquered.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • The entire Sons of Horus legion in False Gods after they trample a crowd of innocent people when they're consumed with rage and grief at Horus being severely wounded by the anathame.
  • The Vlka Fenryka, whose reputation is so bad that anything short of total guaranteed extermination is considered insufficiently risky to call them in - and sometimes not even that.
  • The Dark Angels are mentioned to have a sinister reputation thanks to the Rangdan Xenocides, where they conducted "bio-pogroms" that saw them killing entire planetary populations who'd been mentally enslaved by the Rangda.
• He's Back!: In Know No Fear "Samus is here!"
• He Will Not Cry, so I Cry for Him: Euphrati Keeler says this about Rogal Dorn after he has learned the truth of Horus's fall.
  Nathaniel Garro:"Why do you weep? Is it for us?"
  Euphrati Keeler: "For him, Nathaniel, because he can't. Today you and I have broken a brother's heart, and nothing will ever mend it."
• Hidden Depths:
  • Perturabo turns out to be surprisingly cultured and artistic for a guy who once ordered his legion to decimate itself and specialises in knocking down fortresses.
  • The White Scars are fond of pastimes such as poetry, calligraphy, and playing Go, and consider them integral to a true warrior's life.
• Hive Mind: One example in Tales of a a psyker using hive-mind possessed empaths as a time-travelling communication device. It's more impressive because said psyker is actually a Pariah and an apprentice Sister of Silence.
  • In Betrayer the World Eaters Librarians combine themselves to form a gestalt consciousness.
• Hollywood Tactics: Averted with most battles and most Legions, as they use their extensive arsenals to the full. Justified when Space Marines charge into melee range against mortal soldiers, as they are crushingly superior to them.
  • The World Eaters play it straight against the Ultramarines, but it is shown to be a problem as they suffer heavy losses. This is a result of their implants interfering with planning and discipline.
  • Averted in most void battles, with ships fighting thousands of kilometres apart, although in orbital battles things can get much more "in your face."
• The Homeward Journey: Deathfire is about the Salamanders in Guilliman's Imperium Secundus deciding to carry the corpse of their fallen Primarch Vulkan back to Nocturne, with the added subtlety that they are split between those who think that he's dead and simply needs a proper burial and those who believe that he could be brought back to life once on Nocturne. Of course, the traitor legions are very interested in having Vulkan's corpse and taking the fulgurite in his chest and chase after the Salamanders.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Being Warhammer 40,000, some of the nastiest and most brutal creatures out there are wearing the Imperium's colors. After conquering a galaxy of other species, they start fighting each other.
• Humiliation Conga: Erebus in Betrayer. Forced to seek shelter with his Primarch, belittled by him in front of Argel Tal, Lorgar, and Kharn, and then beaten to bloody scraps by Kharn after murdering Argel Tal. Then when he finally makes it back to Horus, the Watmaster peels off his face for blaming him for the failure to bring the Blood Angels to the side of chaos.
• I Am a Humanitarian: In Prospero Burns:
  Hawser: The...the Vlka Fenryka are capable of cannibalism?
  Skarssi: We are capable of anything. That is the point of us.
• I Am Spartacus: All the Alpha Legion are Alpharius. It makes the scheming and unconventional warfare easier when the non-Legion don't know who's who. Exaggerated by the fact that apart from Alpharius himself, not even the Alpha Legionnaires are aware which one of them is Alpharius at times.
• I Can Still Fight!: Nathaniel Garro and Solomon Demeter after they suffer injuries.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Some of the Emperor's actions can charitably be called this. See Alternative Character Interpretation for more details.
  • Playing it straight, the Emperor's actions were pursuing the only way to ensure humanity's survival.
  • This is such a common theme throughout the series that practically no installment goes without at least one variation of the following exchange:
  Character 1: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???
  Character 2: What needed to BE done!
• Humongous Mecha: Knights and Titans occasionally pop up in the story. Some of their most remarkable appearances happen at the Battle of Isstvan III, where the Dies Irae turns out to be on Horus' side and begins mowing down loyalist Marines. The Battle of Molech also features a Knight House defending their world. However, the Battle of Beta-Garmon remains the most remarkable deployment of the Titan Legions, with 27 Legions on the Imperial side, and "several dozen" in Horus' side.
• I Gave My Word: Garro saves Tarvitz on this. Fulgrim tries it on Ferrus Manus; it doesn't work.
• Ignored Epiphany: Fulgrim. He has another one later, far, far too late.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Leman Russ tries to reach Horus during the Battle of Trisolian and almost pulls it off thanks to the Spear of Russ.
  • In The End and the Death Vol. III, Garviel Loken doesn't even try to fight Horus, knowing that the Warmaster can and will squash him like a bug. Instead, he pleads with him to turn away from Chaos and once again become the father he remembers. Incredibly enough, it works.
• I Know Your True Name:
  • Do you remember how in 40K knowing a daemon's true name can give you power over it? It turns out the reverse is true. Prospero Burns has a Tzeentchian daemon tearing through Space Wolves left and right because it knows their true names from Kasper Hawser. The only ones who are immune are Hawser, because he didn't know his own name, and Bear, because that's what Hawser called him and not his real name.
  • Damon Prytanis pulls this on a daemon near the beginning of The Unremembered Empire, after tricking it into thinking that it knows -his- True Name
  • Constantin Valdor's personal weapon, the Apollonian Spear, allows him to learn the true name of anything he kills with it.
• Immortality Hurts: As the Night Haunter demonstrates to Vulkan in Vulkan Lives. Constant regeneration can be awful.
• Implied Death Threat: Vulkan's response to the Night Haunter's speech is to remind him not to leave hammers in his reach.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Loken, Garro, Tarvitz, Keeler, Lord Commander Vespasian, and Qruze, all of whom remained loyal even when faced with the full power of Chaos. The Astartes characters are especially notable for being members of Legions that went wholesale traitor.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Loken's suspicion of Erebus is increased when the latter names the stolen kinebrach sword, which was only ever described as a "weapon."
• I Never Told You My Name: Inverted in The End and the Death, John Grammaticus crosses path with one friendly Alpha Legion Space Marine who's in reality Ingo Pech and then another who tries to pass off as the first, but John notes that the second never calls him by his name although he told Pech his name already. It allows him to rapidly unmask the impostor.
• The Infiltration: In Deliverance Lost, the plot follows the point of view of an Alpha Legion infiltrator among the Raven Guard.
• Infodump: The prologue of Descent of Angels is eight pages/twenty minutes of telling the reader about Caliban, its knightly orders, Lion El'Jonson, and his crusade to exterminate the great beasts.
• Informed Ability: Played with in Horus Rising. Loken is an admirer of the iterators, taking the opportunity to attend a speech given by primary iterator Kyril Sindermann, rigorously trained and the most famed member of his work, who gives a vapid sermon mostly consisting of a very thin argument, admitting near the start that "I'm right and you're wrong" isn't a very good debate point but ends the speech saying exactly that and proclaiming the Imperial Truth. The speech itself is widely applauded by other iterators and Loken, one of the more aware Astartes in the series, doesn't question it in any serious way. The narration even admits that some of the audience members were planted to get applause going. It adds onto the theme of the pre-Heresy Imperium being an intellectually bankrupt authoritarian state, better in ways but not too drastically different to the theocratic dystopia it would become, and many of its followers and agents are just as indoctrinated.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: When hunting Curze aboard his flagship, Lion thinks of his brother as "it", a monster to be put down. Given that Curze has sped past his Moral Event Horizon way before the story proper starts, he may be justified.
• It's All About Me: Horus, again. It's his Heresy. The Primarchs seem to have this as a trait generally.
• It's All My Fault: Horus blames himself often.
  • When Angron's attack throws off his plans in Galaxy in Flames.
  • Horus was like this a lot in Horus Rising but when things go to hell, he claims that it wasn't his fault (which it wasn't). Then he decides he's had enough and kills everything.
• It Was a Gift: Every plot important Space Marine has one or two of these. Primarchs have them up the wazoo. They vary in importance from "offhand mention" to "will be referenced in another book" to "major overarching plot point".
• Kick Them While They Are Down: The traitors do this a lot. Eidolon's attack in Galaxy in Flames intentionally starts with the wounded and The Medic. Lucius does it to Solomon Demeter in Fulgrim.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch:
  • You can't help but cheer a little when Fulgrim kills Eidolon in The Reflection Crack'd.
  • It's fair to say that nobody particularly minded Horus peeling off Erebus's face at the end of Fear to Tread. Some even cheered.
  • Vulkan mocks Konrad Curze to his face before beating the shit out of him with his hammer and teleporting out.
• Knee-capping: Before he escapes, Vulkan breaks Curze's knees with a giant power hammer.
• Knights and Knaves: Lorgar's encounter with Fateweaver in the Eye of Terror. While Fateweaver's two heads do speak a few lines of dialogue in unison telling the truth, which causes him some visible strain, one head does tell Lorgar about killing Guilliman and establishing himself as an equal to his brothers, while the other tells him that that act would cost him his ultimate victory in The Long Game. In the events that follow throughout the millennia, it's never established which head was the one telling the truth.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: Spear, created to kill the Emperor himself. He's a Black Pariah - a super-anti-psyker to Emperor's super-psyker - but their confrontation, unfortunately for the readers, never happens, as Spear is killed and Horus forbids the creation of a successor.
• The Last DJ: Several of the loyalist members of the Traitor Legions fit the trope, particularly Nathaniel Garro, Garviel Loken, Saul Tarvitz, and Barabas Dantioch. They are very good at what they do, highly respected by Astartes from other Legions, and often represent the last vestiges of what their Legion used to be before it was taken over by their primarch and reshaped in his image. They frequently clash with other members of their legions over their loyalty to the Emperor and their insistence on holding onto the old ways. All this sees the marked for death when the Traitor Legions turn on the Imperium.
• Last Stand:
  • Galaxy in Flames has a pretty epic one courtesy of Imperial loyalists on Istvaan III. It wasn't supposed to go down this way - Horus wanted to virus bomb the life out of loyalists - but then Angron got bored or angry and went down to kill them the old-fashioned way.
  • During the Siege of Terra, the battle devolves into a prolonged last stand for the loyalists after the Legio Mortis breaches the Ultimate Wall, allowing Horus' armies to storm the Inner Palace. The tip of the balance is irremediably tipped in favor of Horus' side, but there are still hundreds of kilometers of cityscape to fight through and the loyalists shift to fighting in order to hurt the enemy as much as possible. For instance, Rogal Dorn allows Sigismund to go mount a rear guard action meant to bleed the traitors as much as possible, and Euphrati Keeler also helps mobilize the human civilians to fight the Heretic Astartes.
• Lawful Stupid: It doesn't matter how effective psykers are against the Chaos powers the Traitor Legions are now wielding. As far as the Legio Custodes, the Imperial Fists, and the Space Wolves are concerned, the Edict of Nikaea is in effect until the Emperor says otherwise, even though Malcador, who was named Regent of the Imperium by the Emperor, has given tacit approval for the Legions to begin employing Librarians again. And they will try to enforce this on Loyalist Legions.
  • A Dark Angels Chaplain tries to push the point with the Lion after one of the legion's Librarians has just broken the edict to kill a bunch of daemons that have attacked the bridge of the Invincible Reason, demanding that the Librarian in question be executed. The Lion responds by backhanding the Chaplain so hard that he accidentally decapitates him.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In Scars, a shard of Magnus discusses all the things he's learned through his sorcery with Jaghatai, ending by saying that he has "witnessed the authors" and that "they are terrible".
  • In Child of Chaos, the Hate Sink Erebus has a passage of narration discussing how he is hated and how "they" might look for some Freudian Excuse in his past that reads very like he's talking about his out of universe reputation.
• Lecherous Licking: To authorize an order (for which verification of one's DNA is necessary), most people spit on dataslate or kiss it. Curze licks it slowly with a very unsettling description.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Playing with a Trope. Loken punches Lucius in the face during their sparring match. Lucius later claims that Loken cheated, but Loken said their match wouldn't be just "about the sword."
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: At the end of Ruinstorm, the Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Ultramarines fleets, then sailing together through the Ruinstorm, decide to strategically split up. While Sanguinius and his Legion rush to Terra, the Dark Angels and Ultramarines enact a retribution campaign on worlds held by Horus' side, hoping to cripple the traitors' war effort, bring some long due vengeance, and lure the Traitor Legions out of Sanguinius' way.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: The Primarchs are oath-bound by the Emperor to never speak of what befell the II and XI Legiones Astartes. Even after they rebel against the Emperor, none of the traitor primarchs break the oath.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Kasper Hawser is forced to cut off Bear's arm to save him from the daemon's magic fire.
• Lighter and Softer: As amazing as this trope may seem in this franchise, the earlier books in the Horus Heresy are much less Grimdark than the books later in the series and much, much lighter than the books taking place in the 41st Millennium.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The Siege of Terra, Primarchs, and Character Series books have all received special editions, usually released a few months before the standard editions. To justify their price ($65-80 USD), they're limited to 2,500 copies apiece and come with autographs, fancy covers, gilt pages, and character art, among other things. As the series has gone on, many of the older books have received limited hardback reprints with extra art and new afterwords included.
• Long-Running Book Series: Per the introduction. So much so that compared to the in-universe description of the Heresy's length (seven to nine years depending on the source), the series is pulling into the final stretch at fourteen years and counting. The first book of the core series, Horus Rising, was published in 2006. The final book of the Siege of Terra series, The End and the Death Vol. III, was published in 2024.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Fulgrim in Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix knew that having people fear him would only lead to them rebelling against him, which is why he helps one of Kasperos Telmar's victims to his feet, to show that the Primarch is somebody not to be feared. This is in direct contrast to Konrad Curze's use of terror tactics to scare the people of Nostramo into behaving or else, which stopped working when they realized that he wasn't coming back anytime soon.
• Mad Doctor: Apothecary Fabius of the Emperor's Children doesn't believe that his brother legionaries can achieve their Primarch's ideal of perfection through strength of will and arm alone, so he tinkers with their biology, modifying organs and adding new ones when he thinks they can help, no matter the source. His alterations to Marius Vairosean made him the first Noise Marine.
• Magic Music: The music on Isstvan III and in the Laeran temple (later adapted into the Maraviglia). They both make people go insane. The latter summons Slaaneshi daemonettes.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: How the Alpha Legion make themselves look like Alpharius, and also how they infiltrate the Raven Guard.
• Malicious Slander: Erebus, when he's talking to anyone who isn't already a traitor.
• Manipulative Bastard: Erebus, again. It was his cooperation with Kor Phaeron that turned Lorgar to Chaos. He also steals the kinebrach anathame from the Interex, causing the Imperium-Interex relationship to end with the latter - who knew how to fight Chaos - being exterminated. Finally, he plants the anathame so that it would injure Horus and then convinces his Legion to use some shady Chaos methods to save him, cementing Horus' fall.
• Manly Tears: Loyalist death scenes trigger those in their comrades.
• Meaningful Name: During the Crusade, the Space Wolves were called the Rout.
• Meaningful Rename: Many of the Legions were renamed by their Primarchs in the Back Story; the betrayed Sons of Horus (briefly) call themselves the Luna Wolves again; and Abaddon renames the Sons of Horus to the Black Legion at the end.
• Meat Puppet:
  • In Prospero Burns Amon Tauromachian was controlled by a daemon who claimed to be Amon of the Fifteenth Astartes, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship. He couldn't move and he was forced to speak the words put into his mouth. Supposedly, he was controlled so thoroughly because his puppeteer had the same name as him.
  • Kasper Hawser. Everything he saw and experienced was relayed to the daemon. His actions and memories were also subtly influenced.
  • The Emperor speaks almost exclusively through his Custodians in The End and the Death. During their fight on the Vengeful Spirit, he simply takes control of them and fights with them as if they're extensions of his own body.
• The Medic: Apothecaries. Every company has one.
• Merchandise-Driven: This series was created to help sell expensive pieces of plastic. That's what the majority of the surviving characters are now.
• Metronomic Man Mashing: When Corax fights a Defiler in Corax: Soulforge, it picks him up and smashes him against the ground a few times.
• Mercy Kill: Guilliman has to do this to a tele-fragged Ultramarine in "Know No Fear".
• A Million Is a Statistic. Even a billion is small fry in some Imperium missions.
• Mid-Season Twist: Vengeful Spirit reveals a critical component in the history of the Imperium: the Emperor didn't create the primarchs with science alone, but also used some kind of power he stole from the Chaos Gods by entering a specific portal to the warp. Horus treads on the same path and is further empowered by the Chaos Gods themselves.
• Mind Rape: As part of his torture of Vulkan, Curze puts him in a nightmare in which he gives him an illusion of escaping, only to crush it and have him fight Corvus Corax.
• Mirroring Factions: Oddly enough, the Space Wolves and the Thousand Sons. Both suffer from a flaw that reshapes their bodies and minds into crazed killing machines, and both defied the Emperor's edict about psychic powers, although the Rune Priests justify it with their belief that their powers come from Fenris itself. Ahriman even drives Wyrdmake insane by demonstrating their commonality as psykers.
• Mobile Maze: Surprisingly popular.
  • The Iron Labyrinth, the final torture of Vulkan, is this, a giant maze of moving parts, designed by Perturabo.
  • Perturabo also has Cavea Ferrum, which serves as his mobile command centre and which only he knows how to navigate.
  • The Emperor built another labyrinth with similar mobility to protect the basis of the Primarch project; Corax breaks into it in Deliverance Lost by tricking it into locking itself open.
  • The Iron Labyrinth returns in The Lost and the Damned, when Kharn and Lotara Sarrin use it to contain Angron until he can be set loose on Terra.
• Molotov Truck: Perturabo employs this method in The Solar War. Except he's using mass conveyors, bigger than any warship and loaded with perverted Mechanicum devices, to paralyse the defences in their path.
• Mook–Face Turn: Many a member of traitorous Legions (eg. Loken, Tarvitz, Garro, Narek) turn against their Primarchs when the rebellion starts.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: Everyone is all over the place, even if loyalists gravitate more to White and traitors closer to Black. Sanguinius sits firmly on the white end of the scale, with Vulkan not far behind. As we go closer to gray, there are many loyalists with their pragmatism and violence, but also sympathetic villains like Magnus or John Grammaticus. Past the mid-point, there are many traitors, including Horus, but also good guys with shady actions, like Azkaellon or most of the Rout. With even Curze having a Freudian Excuse, pretty much the only person who can be said to occupy the furthest Black is Erebus. Just to add more flavour, the Emperor is an ambiguous, Narek is a developing Übermensch and the Chaos Gods are blue and orange.
• More than Mind Control: Kasper Hawser's life was subtly influenced by a Chaos daemon instead of the Thousand Sons like was first thought. The daemon could see and experience everything he did and influence his actions and memories.
• Motive Decay: Horus suffers a bad case of "This is your motive on Chaos". He starts off with "prevent the Emperor from being worshiped as a god in line with the ideals of the Great Crusade" to "burn the galaxy and kill everyone who gets in my way".
• Musical Assassin: Warsingers and Noise Marines can kill and maim with their music and singing.
• My Defense Need Not Protect Me Forever: The Siege of Terra is about delaying Horus for long enough so that reinforcements from the rest of the Imperium can come and crush the traitors in the Sol System.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: Euphrati Keeler says this trope almost word-for-word to Ignace Karkasy in "False Gods".
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Fulgrim suffers this at the very end of Fulgrim, when he kills Ferrus Manus.
  • Horus has one during his climactic duel with the Emperor during the Siege of Terra. In the brief moments before he's completely obliterated by the Emperor's psychic onslaught, the man Horus once was comes back and he basically has time for this trope, followed by "I'm sorry"... and then he dies.
  • Downplayed and averted in Age of Darkness. A loyalist Thousand Son attempts to "heal" (using his psychic powers to show him how wrong his actions were, and offering to remove the Butcher's Nails in his skull) Kharn of the World Eaters. He fails, but his last revenge before Kharn kills him is telling Kharn that he will forever live with the knowledge that his betrayal was wrong (and that he could willingly have turned back). He then wonders what effect this will have on Kharn in the future.
    • A small side note; In the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy, Kharn is shown to be the comparative voice of reason and calm to his Primarch. He only gained his reputation for being a tad touchy AFTER the Heresy was over...
    • Not so much in the Heresy. Right after the Betrayal at Istvaan III he's seen as a slavering lunatic, roaring about the Eightfold Path. This madness-on-the-edge-of-control continues into Age of Darkness' "Rebirth" where he's acknowledged as being changed into a borderline madman, consumed by bloodlust. Although based on his subsequent outings in Butcher's Nails and Betrayer, this was more likely the effect of being up-close with a powerful psyker, on a world where the Warp was reeling from the deaths of millions of psykers. Betrayer suggests that his frenzy on Isstvan III was similar; he can barely remember his time on that world.
    • This is presumably Khorne's little joke: the Blood God would probably be amused by the idea of turning the Legion's most restrained, stable and level-headed individual into a raving lunatic, if he wasn't so bloody furious all the time.
    • Kharn's team killing tendencies could be partly the result of being unable to mentally reconcile a berserker mentality with genuine guilt.

N-R

• Naïve Newcomer: The Imperium, of all people. Most of the other civilizations they meet are flabbergasted when they learn the Imperials have no knowledge of Chaos or the dangers of the Warp.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Eisenstein. Yes, the ship.
• Nerdgasm: An In-Universe example in Nemesis when the Eversor member of the execution squad sees the weapons he is getting. It's played for laughs and Fan Disservice.
• Neutrality Backlash:
  • Horus uses the planet Bastion to demonstrate that this trope is in full effect in Age of Darkness.
  • Angels of Darkness, set in the modern 40K universe, along with short stories in Age of Darkness and The Primarchs, suggest the Dark Angels will be in for this.
  • Another Dark Angels short story plays with this. One planet in an important sector chooses to side with neither faction and points out that the only thing that both factions can offer as incentive is this very trope.
  • In one of the Horus Heresy black books, Autek Mor of the Iron Hands nukes every major city on a planet that surrendered to Horus' forces without a fight, just to drive home the point that neutrality and surrender to the enemy cannot be tolerated.
• Neutral No Longer: Jaghatai spends most of Scars trying to decide whether he should help out Leman Russ (good guy, but asshole) or Horus (evil, but the Khan had promised to aid him when called upon), not knowing who is in the right. He finally sides with the Imperium when Magnus tells him it'll be better this way and Mortarion (evil and asshole) tries to pull him to Horus' side by force.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Where do we start?
  • The Lion's extermination of Caliban's Great Beasts in Descent of Angels is revealed to have nasty consequences in Fallen Angels.
  • The Emperor causes many messes. It's enough to make some readers think that he is either an idiot or wanted to end up on the Golden Throne.
    • His 'rebuke' of the Word Bearers and Lorgar. As pointed out in one novel, it's not like their religious aspect was anything new, so why wait so long to bring them to task, and why in such a brutal and humiliating way? Hell, the fact that Magnus and Russ agree that the rebuke was a bad idea makes this all the clearer.
    • The Emperor made sorcery and psykers illegal, which Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons Legion reluctantly accepted. However, when Magnus foresees Horus's betrayal, he breaks his promise and contacts the Emperor directly via sorcery. The result? The Emperor sends Leman 'I Hate Written Knowledge' Russ to apprehend Magnus on Prospero, better known as the greatest library in the universe after the Black Library. Russ and company believe that the warning was an attempt by Magnus to scare the Emperor into allowing sorcery again, and proceed to destroy Prospero and force Magnus to turn to Tzeentch to save what remained of his legion. ^note  the Emperor orders Leman Russ only to apprehend Magnus and the Thousand Sons. The reason why the Space Wolves fight the Thousand Sons was because Horus (already worshiping Chaos, but still "loyal" to the Emperor) tells Russ that the orders changed from apprehend to kill.
    • The Emperor's plan for dealing with Chaos is to lie to and woefully underinform all of his sons, and his entire population, about what Chaos is (telling Horus, for example, that daemons are just random collections of emotions that have no real intelligence or guiding force), apparently forgetting that one of the major powers of Chaos is to literally play chess with mortals. Didn't he think even once that the Chaos Gods would try to tempt the Primarchs? Or that his lack of instruction on them would leave them largely defenseless?
    • In Angel Exterminatus, we find out the Emperor gave Perturabo some very specific advice. Rather than helping Perturabo avoid a mistake the Emperor almost certainly had foreseen, it ends up pushing him into Horus' camp after making the mistake. Perturabo is also more than a little annoyed that an arena he built for contests of strength and skill was used solely to humiliate Magnus, one of the few Primarchs he got along with, by direct order of the Emperor.
  • Ironically, Magnus breaks it in the exact same situation as the Emperor. His warning obliterates the Emperor's work to open a gateway into the Webway, which would have freed humanity from its dependence on the Warp. For that matter, it's heavily implied that it's Magnus's earlier pact with Tzeentch to save his Legion that was the deciding factor in the Emperor outlawing psykers.
  • Magnus breaking the Webway means that the Emperor has to remain on the Golden Throne to keep the giant warp rift below the Imperial Palace closed. The Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence still have to constantly fight the daemons that get through. This means that the Emperor cannot do anything about any problem that he could have helped solve until his duel with Horus.
  • Virtually everything the Iron Hands do on Pythos plays right into the hands of the daemon Madail.
  • Dantioch using the Pharos to force the Night Lords off Sotha, and thereby overloading it creates a psychic flare so bright that, the Tyranids see it even in the void between galaxies and begin their journey towards the Milky Way.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • The assault on Calth and the Shadow Crusade is planned to wipe out the Ultramarines and trap the survivors in the Ruinstorm. Instead, the Ultramarines earn a hard-won victory at Calth, withstand the Shadow Crusade and stay safe while the galaxy goes to hell, emerging as the strongest post-heresy power and leading the counterattack after the Battle of Terra.
  • Konrad in Vulkan Lives, on smaller scale. Sure, before giving it to Vulkan, he does disable the "teleport" function of the hammer, but forgets to disable its function of, well, a hammer, leading to Vulkan laying an impressive smackdown on him. Not to mention that the teleport turns out to be working just fine enough for Vulkan to make his escape.
  • The Alpha Legion blockading Jaghatai's fleet at Chondax. If it wasn't for them, the Khan would have been on his merry way to slaughter the Space Wolves, scoring yet another point for Horus's side. As it is, he stays in system long enough to get Dorn's message explaining what's really going on. Although knowing Alpha Legion, this may have been done on purpose.
  • The Istvaan III Massacre was supposed to purge the loyalist elements of the Traitor Legions. Instead, Angron goes down to the planet to kill the survivors of the virus bombing personally, turning what should have been a quick and clean extermination into a protracted battle of attrition that Horus can't afford. It also gives the loyalists in the fleet the chance to escape and warn the Imperium of what's happening.
  • An observation and a bit of introspection by Kharn makes it clear that the modern Imperium of Man (in all it's Villain Protagonist glory/infamy) is entirely the Traitor Legions' fault, as it was the Heresy that moulded the Imperium from the somewhat egalitarian but relatively naive entity is was during the Great Crusade into the oppressive and genocidal entity it is in 40K that is nonetheless the greatest opponent Chaos faces.
• Nice to the Waiter: Horus was popular with his ship's mortal crew and Imperial Army auxiliaries before going off the deep end. Otherwise, a good way to distinguish between the good guys and the bad.
• No Hero to His Valet: Averted; almost every heroic figure is held in high esteem by all, except for the main characters. This is exemplified when a Legion's Space Marines generally have such a lofty opinion of their Primarchs that it borders (and crosses into) fanaticism.
  • However, in some cases it is played straight. Angron treats his own bodyguards with scorn, as they're unable to keep up with him on the battlefield. A dying World Eater's last words are "Piss on Angron's grave when he finally lies dead."
  • Perturabo is worse, having subjected his legion to decimation because they didn't fit his standards.
• No Place for Me There / No Place for a Warrior:
  • Invoked as one of the (vaguely) more justified reasons for some Legions rebelling, at least initially. A lot of the traitor Legions (and more than a few loyalists) raise concerns about what would happen when the Great Crusade is over or when they are no longer needed. This then sublimates into a resentment towards the people who are inhabiting the world that they helped to create. However, it's unknown what the Emperor intended to do with the Astartes after they were no longer needed.
  • Directly averted by the Ultramarines. Guilliman makes it clear that although Astartes were designed for war, they could excel at anything, so he's working on teaching them more peaceful pursuits for when the Crusade was over.
• Noble Demon: Perturabo has shades of this. During the events of Angel Exterminatus it's stated that he does not hate the Loyalist Legions, just sees them as being used and abused by the Emperor as much as the Traitor Legions were. He also allows the crew of the Sisypheum to escape after they destroy Fulgrim's flagship.
• Not As You Knew Them: In 40K the Space Wolves are one of the nicer chapters in their relations with normal humans, especially civilians. During the Crusade, their reputation for ruthlessness, superstition and savagery against their foes made the Vlka Fenryka the most feared force in the galaxy, with some Imperial Army units considering defeat preferable to calling the Rout for help.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • Maloghurst and Horus both turn up alive after their deaths seem apparent.
  • As of the Audio Book 'Legion of One', it is confirmed that Garviel Loken is this too, as the Warrior Cerberus
  • In Saturnine, Shiban Khan of the White Scars is apparently killed when his shuttle crashes into the Eternity Wall, only for the following book to reveal that he survived.
• Not So Stoic: Roboute Guilliman is ordinarily the most level-headed, intellectual Primarch, but when he learns the depth of the Word Bearers' treachery at the Battle of Calth, he swears to kill Lorgar personally, even after admitting that it's not the best move tactically.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Space Wolves: brutal, brain-dead proto-Vikings in Space who do nothing but destroy everything in an uncontrollable fury? Nope - highly trained, ruthless, utterly unfettered battlefield analysts designed to kill another Legion as The Emperor's Executioners
• Oblivious to Love:
  • Serena D'Angelus, because she's wrapped up in being corrupted by Slaaneshi influence.
  • Garviel Loken to Mersadie Oliton, though he has an excuse—like most Astartes, he is somewhere between Celibate Hero and outright asexual, though it's never made clear whether this is due to their Bio-Augmentation or their ideology and focus.
• Odd Friendship: Despite one being a mediocre fighter and skilled orator, and other a ruthless warrior with disdain for politics, Lorgar and Angron strike sort-of-a-friendship and save one another on a few occasions.
• Old Retainer: Every Legion has at least one. They vary in plot importance and even background from book to book. Malcador is this to the Emperor.
• One-Man Army: If normal Space Marines are this to humans, the Primarchs are this to Space Marines. We don't get to see it that often, but when the Primarchs let loose, they can be terrifying indeed.
  • Horus Lupercal in Horus Rising. When negotiations break down with the Interex, Horus picks up a fallen Luna Wolf's power sword and combi-bolter and says that if the Interex fears them, then the Luna Wolves are going to give the Interex a reason to fear them..
  • More than a dozen books later in Vengeful Spirit he brings down two gunships with his mace by jumping on them, with a help of Mortarion (who harpoons one with his scythe) and Fulgrim (who partially shields them all and brings down the third gunship with sorcery), and later fights multiple Imperial Knights pretty much by his own, destroying two single-handedly, until the rest of them run away in fear.
  • Angron in Galaxy In Flames: After virus bombing Isstvan III fails to kill the Space Marines who would have stayed loyal, Angron leads an assault force of the World Eaters and starts by tearing through his loyalist sons. The assault is so violent that Saul Tarvitz, a Space Marine, actually runs away.
    • Then in Betrayer, he holds up a Titan's descending foot with his bare hands.
  • In A Thousand Sons, when Ahzek Ahriman meets Leman Russ for the first time, the sheer amount of aggression emanating from Russ's aura is so strong it causes Ahriman a minor Brown Note and he has to cut himself off from the warp for a moment to keep from going nuts. The book also showed that Magnus the Red was quite happily able to go toe to toe with enemy titans when he wanted to.
  • Corvus Corax in The First Heretic: He takes on a small army of Word Bearers who have been possessed by daemons and cuts through them like they're paper. This is repeated later on in Raven's Flight when he takes on an armoured division of Iron Warriors and manages to kill most of them before what's left of his legion becomes involved. Notably he effectively beats a Predator tank to death with his fists then uses what's left of it to kill an enemy tactical squad.
  • Roboute Guilliman in Know No Fear: Fights for ten hours on the hull of his flagship while in orbit low enough to have an atmosphere so thin only a Primarch could survive unhelmeted. All the while, he's killing Word Bearers on the hull with only his power fists.
  • Lion El'Jonson in Descent of Angels: he battles dozens of xenos which are actually daemons on Sarosh by himself without breaking a stride. Then in The Lion short story, he fights his way through dozens of daemons and concludes the incursion by stabbing Kairos Fateweaver, the most powerful Lord of Change in existence, in the heart.
  • Fulgrim in Fulgrim: He manages to cut through the Laer so fast that his own Terminator First Company cannot keep up with his kills. In the same novel, Ferrus Manus manages to cut through the Diasporex soldiers and get to their captain before Fulgrim can.
  • Mortarion in The Flight of the Eisenstein. When mowing down the Jorgall he decides that they're unworthy of being killed by his Manreaper, instead using the Lantern to kill them at will.
  • During the battle of Prospero, Magnus uses his sorcery to inflict horrific deaths on hundreds of rock-hard Space Wolves. Then he uses it on Russ, which only makes Leman angry. You'd be angry too if a gigantic Cyclops broke your armor to pieces with cold fire, punched his fist through one of your hearts, stabbed a psychic blade through your chest and out your back, pummelled the wolves that you likely grew up with, and were blinded by a painful ray of black light. Magnus didn't go down like a chump against Leman Russ, that's for sure.
  • Sanguinius is finally unleashed in Fear To Tread: He takes out two Greater Daemons of Chaos within moments of each other: Ka'Bandha, a Bloodthirster of Khorne, by tearing off one of his wings and throwing him back into a Warp portal, and Kyriss, a Keeper of Secrets of Slaanesh, by pinning him to a wall with a thrown sword and cutting off his/her head.
  • Jaghatai Khan in Brotherhood of the Storm: during the final battle on Chondax, he is cutting through Orks like they are paper. In Path of Heaven, it's mentioned that Ilya Ravallion has seen him flip Land Raiders and mince Terminator companies.
  • Perturabo does this several times in Angel Exterminatus. Every time he picks his hammer up, everyone in his general vicinity dies very, very quickly. He is considered such a threat that the crew of the Sisypheum are willing to self-destruct their ship if it would take him out as well.
  • Lorgar Aurelian in Betrayer. When Angron is buried under several tons of debris, Lorgar uses his psychic powers to kill several Ultramarines while trying to find him. Lorgar is barely looking at the Ultramarines while he does this.
  • Vulkan in Vulkan Lives. During the battle at the Urgall Depression of Isstvan V, he takes on whole squads of traitor Legionaries and even Dreadnoughts. Angron actually appears during this time, and Vulkan is ready to charge the Red Angel by himself. Only an aerial bombardment forces Vulkan to retreat.
  • Konrad Curze in The Unremembered Empire: After spending three months evading the Dark Angels on their own flagship, Curze is able to escape to the surface of Macragge by orchestrating a drop pod assault. Once he gets inside the Fortress of Hera, he goes on a rampage, killing whole squads of Ultramarines and Dark Angels seemingly everywhere at once. The attacks are in such quick succession that the Ultramarines are half convinced that Curze brought several squads of Night Lords with him. When Roboute Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson finally corner him, he is moving so fast that two Primarchs cannot keep up with him.
  • Rogal Dorn doesn't fight very much since he's busy fortifying Terra, but when he finally gets a chance to cut loose, he's in magnificent form. In Praetorian of Dorn, he demolishes a bunch of the XX Legion's elite Lernaean Terminators without breaking a sweat, then outthinks and defeats Alpharius himself. When Samus invades the Phalanx during the events of The Solar War, Dorn faces the daemon prince down and kills it singlehandedly.
  • Also the Custodes, one step down from the Primarchs. In The First Heretic, the Word Bearers watch a squad of Custodes annihilating an enemy force with ease, but notice that they do not fight as a squad or pay attention to the situation of their comrades - despite their superlative skill, their tactics of being One Man Armies is pointed out as their weakness.
• Only Sane Man: The protagonists of each novel get to watch as things go to hell around them.
  • Tirin Maas believes he's this while the rest of Eisenstein's crew appears to turn against the fleet's orders at Isstvan III.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: Such weapons should best be left where they are.
• Only Works Once: Loken's Combat Pragmatist behaviour in his duels with Lucius. Likewise, Dorn has Pluto's moons being blown up to destroy a fleet of Traitors as soon as the traitors capture them, but doesn't repeat this trick because it would be wasteful to use against warned foes and the knowledge of a trap being possible will slow the traitors as surely as if he actually trapped more fortresses.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: The Primarchs have wildly different views on how to conduct war, in light of their drastically different experiences. The differences between their tactics comes at the forefront during the Siege of Terra, where the rapid assault specialist Jaghatai Khan is frustrated to be sitting behind Dorn's fortifications, and eventually sallies out against Dorn's wishes.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Void Dragon, locked under Mars by the Emperor after he found it weakened on Earth. Being C'tan, the only reason it's even called a "dragon" is that it chose that form on Earth.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: "The Imperial Truth". It would be great if those pesky daemons didn't keep popping up. The Emperor has a really good reason to try and quash knowledge of Chaos but unfortunately, Chaos isn't strengthened only by active worship. It is the collective embodiment and manifestation of the emotional output of every sentient being in the material universe, so the Imperial Truth wasn't starving Chaos as it was intended so much as reducing its servings slightly. It turns out that the only real way to counter it is with an alternative object of worship.
• Outside-Context Problem: After the events of the Drop Site Massacre, we see a point of view of Corvus Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard, where he muses over not being able to foresee Horus' betrayal. He decides that there is no way he could have foreseen it, because it should not have been possible.
• Painting the Medium:
  • In The End and the Death: Volume I, Terra is on the verge of collapsing entirely into the Warp, causing time to be distorted into a constant present, with no past or future, only endless "now". The novel reflects this by being written in the present indefinite tense; everything in it is happening now and all at once.
  • Lorgar is a Religious Bruiser whose faith is extremely important to him, seen as a prophetic figure by many of his followers; his Primarch novel Bearer of the Word is structured like a holy text, in books, chapters and verses.
• The Paragon Always Rebels:
  • Horus, the favored son of the Emperor and his chosen Warmaster, is now a traitor that took a huge chunk of the Imperium with him.
  • Ironically, Horus thinks The Paragon is really Sanguinius. It's why Horus tells Ka'Bandha to kill Sanguinius in Fear To Tread, both because Horus knew, deep down, that the Chaos Gods couldn't corrupt Sanguinius, and also because turning Sanguinius would result in a possible rival to Horus's leadership of the Traitor Legions.
  • Erebus opines that it's Guilliman, predicting he would be the one to take over if something happened to the Emperor. He's right.
  • Averted by Lord Commander Vespasian of the Emperor's Children, who pre-Heresy was considered a model Astartes and had no vices or desires the Slaaneshi daemon could use to corrupt him.
• Parental Favoritism: The Emperor doesn't treat his sons equally. While the likes of Horus and Fulgrim were heavily favored by the Emperor and He was friendly to the likes of Russ and Vulkan, other primarchs like Perturabo and Angron were treated like dirt. Some books like The Master of Mankind wonder whether the Emperor truly liked any of the Primarchs.
  • Said Primarchs also had their favourites among their legions. The Iron Warriors, Emperor's Children, and Word Bearers notably compete for the attention of their Primarchs, leading to internecine intrigues.
• Party Scattering:
  • The Salamanders, Raven Guard and Iron Hands participating in the battle of Isstvan V get scattered as the few who don't die are forced to flee in a disorganized manner, leading to bands of loyalists made of several Legions fighting a guerrilla war deep in traitor territory.
  • In Angel Exterminatus, the Emperor's Children are scattered across the galaxy and the Legion devolves into individual warbands. The same happens to the Night Lords at the end of the Thramas Crusade, after Sevatar orders the fleets to scatter. The Alpha Legion also scatters across the galaxy, though this seems to be more or less normal for them.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Multiple times the Horus Heresy paints the Emperor as, bluntly, an arrogant prick who held a great deal of responsibility for his sons falling and the Heresy occurring in the first place. He waits a century before censuring Lorgar for establishing the Imperial Cult on conquered worlds, while simultaneously humiliating the Primarch and the entire Legion and destroying the innocent inhabitants of a world to make a point. He refuses to explain to Horus why he is leaving the Great Crusade, despite their closeness and the obvious damage the lack of trust did to his most favoured son. Magnus the Red arguably fares worst of all, as the Emperor specifically sends Russ and the Space Wolves, a Primarch and Legion who loath Magnus and the Thousand Sons to their core, to bring Magnus back to Terra, making it child's play for Horus to change the order to one of extermination.
• People Puppets: Prospero Burns. The daemon controls people with their names.
• Personal Effects Reveal: Horus Rising when Captain Loken finds a lodge badge; The Flight of the Eisenstein, when Garro goes through Kaleb's possessions and finds a copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • All of the Primarchs are superhuman warriors of peerless might, capable of cutting through hundreds of times their number in Space Marines.
  • Magnus, as the most powerful psyker in the galaxy short of his father, can kill a hundred Marines with a glance, destroy Titans with a hurricane of psyflame, and even raze the surface of a planet by bringing the Immaterium into realspace.
  • This is sort of the hat of the Thousand Sons in general. Captains of the Thousand Sons can easily kill Space Wolves and even Custodians with their potent sorcery (Phosis T'kar remarking on how unimpressed he was with the prowess of the Custodians), and at one point a Thousand Son channels so much of the Warp into him that he goes off like a miniature supernova, annihilating everything within a ten kilometer radius.
  • Lorgar Aurelian, post Istvaan V, also becomes a very powerful psyker, capable of crushing Titans with his telekinesis and bringing down Thunderhawks with a glance.
  • The Emperor demonstrates just how comprehensively He fits this trope in Master of Mankind by singlehandedly obliterating an army of daemons with his fiery power sword and unparalleled psychic might.
• The Peter Principle: Phratus Auguston is appointed acting First Chapter Master of the Ultramarines by Guilliman in The Unremembered Empire, because of his abilities as a fighter and frontline commander. However, he lacks political awareness and tact, and this stymies him in his new role.
• Place Beyond Time: The Immaterium and Horus's visions during his time in the Temple of the Serpent Lodge. Terra itself becomes one during the Siege, as the increasing influence of the Warp effectively breaks time in an expanding radius around the planet.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: Sigismund to Dorn during his Heroic BSoD in Crimson Fist has elements of this. Dorn decides he's Not Worth Killing, as it would devastate Legion morale.
• Posthumous Character:
  • The only immediate conclusion that can be drawn about Primarchs 2 and 11. They are mentioned several times, but characters talking about them are either interrupted by other characters or stop conveniently short of revealing something important about why they are not around any more. The series is also sprinkled with hints about what may have happened to them and their Legions. Leman Russ implies that the Space Wolves were ordered on to fight another legion before the burning of Prospero and an operative of the Vanus temple has been called on to eliminate at least one "Brother Captain". There are theories given in universe. The most popular one is that the survivors of the legions were absorbed into the Ultramarines after their primarchs were expunged from the Imperium, explaining why there are so many of them.
  • In The First Heretic, the temporally displaced Word Bearers witnessing the creation of the Primarchs contemplate pre-emptively killing the XI Primarch to avoid the (implied) bloodshed that will happen when the legion is purged.
  • Hastur Sejanus has strong elements of this in Horus Rising and False Gods.
• The Power of Blood: A lot of Chaos power runs on blood - most notably the sacrificial rituals and anything involving Khorne.
• The Power of Friendship: A few friendships made cross-legion prove to be stronger than the marines' infamous loyalty to their Primarch.
  • Saul Tarvitz and Nathaniel Garro.
  • Targutai Yesugei and Revuel Arvida.
  • Barabas Dantioch and Alexis Polux's friendship might be the most remarkable, as it bridges the gap between two Legions who despise one another.
• Power of Trust: A running theme through the series, and a big part of the opening trilogy is just who the loyalist marines can trust.
• Praetorian Guard:
  • The Custodes are this to the Emperor. They are the most powerful transhuman creations of the Emperor short of the Primarchs, and are usually tasked with guaranteeing his security.
  • Many of the primarchs have honour guards whose official role is to bodyguard their leader. But since primarchs are already so powerful, these guards usually end up Bodyguarding a Badass and are more of an elite shock unit that support their primarchs instead. Some of the most notable examples are Mortarion's Deathshroud Terminators, who first appear in the series in Flight of the Eisenstein and cannot be further than 49 steps away from him; there's also Fulgrim's Phoenix Guard and Ferrus Manus's Morlocks, who have something of a malignant rivalry after Fulgrim's failed attempt to convert Ferrus to Horus' side before the Heresy begins in earnest, and the cadre of Phoenix Guard kills their counterparts in the Morlocks to escape. Rogal Dorn's Templars are officially tasked with guarding the Imperial Fists' Temple of Oaths on the Phalanx, but also bodyguard Dorn in battle; he also has the Huscarls. Jaghatai Khan's Keshig are also another example, remarkable in that they are the only ones wearing Terminator armour in a legion which prefers speed.
  • Lorgar created one, the Gal Vorbak, fairly late, roughly 40 years before the start of the Heresy. They were formed from the surviving Astartes "expedition force" that returned from their excursion into the Eye of Terror, and came back... changed. It's debatable if they're his bodyguard however, as in The First Heretic they fight separately from him, and have spent sixty years away until that point.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Vulkan, after finding a teleport-equipped hammer and being taunted with the news that the teleport function won't work: "It's also a hammer." Cue Knee-capping and No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  • "I don't speak Traitor" *BOOM* Again, courtesy of the Salamanders.
  • "If you truly do hail from the realm that men once called hell, when you return there, tell your kindred it was Sanguinius who threw you back." — Sanguinus just before he turns Ka'Bandha into so much fish food.
• Prequel in the Lost Age: These books are essentially the story of how Warhammer 40,000 became such a Crapsack World. Others are more directly this - Angel Exterminatus is a clear prequel to Storm of Iron.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • "This. World. Is. MURDER!"
  • "You. Killed. Cyrene."
• Prophecies Are Always Right: Either rejected or embraced depending on who you're speaking to:
  • Rejected by Lorgar in Betrayer, who has seen visions of Sanguinius dying at Signus, falling to Chaos, and fighting at Terra. While Erebus is convinced that they can either kill or convert Sanguinius, Lorgar rejects the visions they have both seen of the first two and says that the third is what will come to pass, because he knows his brother better than Erebus. However, one of the great ironies of Betrayer is that Lorgar actually doesn't know his brothers as well as he thinks he does.
  • Embraced by the Cabal with "the Acuity", a form of divination based on Eldar farseeing. In Legion, they reveal to Alpharius and Omegon that if the Emperor wins the Horus Heresy, the Imperium will stagnate and collapse after ten or twenty thousand years, where humanity will fall to the Chaos Gods. However, if Horus wins, a remnant of his original personality will emerge at the grief he experiences and basically wipe out the humans in a self-destructive crusade, taking the Chaos Gods with humanity, which convinces the Twin Primarchs to ally the Alpha Legion with Horus. The Cabal maintains that the Acuity is flawlessly accurate, but in Vulkan Lives, Eldrad Ulthran, a real Eldar Farseer, indicates that it may be wrong, and that a military victory for the Imperium may be the best outcome.
  • Played with thoroughly during The End and The Death regarding the Dark King. Part 1 gives every indication that Horus will become the Dark King, which makes sense as he's the overall antagonist and is being empowered directly by all 4 Chaos Gods. However, due to time being locked into an eternal present during the end of the Siege, the Prophecy "slips" sideways - the Dark King will be incarnated either way. Unfortunately, it's the Emperor.
• Purple Prose: The writers really cut loose when called upon to describe the Primarchs or the Emperor Himself.
• The Purge: The virus bombing of Isstvan III.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • At the end of Galaxy in Flames, Loken and company make damn sure Horus's victory costs him.
  • In Know No Fear, Calth is technically a victory for the Ultramarines because they survive, but they really have to bleed for it.
  • The Siege of Terra. The Imperium is victorious, but Terra is a shattered ruin, Sanguinius and billions of others are dead, and the Emperor is mortally wounded.
• The Quest: Angel Exterminatus is basically the Emperor's Children and Iron Warriors travelling into the Eye of Terror to retrieve a powerful weapon named the Angel Exterminatus. It turns out to be a quest to raise Fulgrim to Daemon Princehood, with the Iron Warriors being used as pawns by the Emperor's Children. Oll Persson and his friends from Calth spend the Heresy wandering through time and space on their way to deliver an athame to the Emperor that will ultimately help him kill Horus.
• The Radio Dies First: The Chaos Gods disrupt the Warp to prevent long-range communication between worlds and expeditionary fleets. It has huge consequences; for instance in Scars, where the White Scars spend most of the book unsure of what is happening in the galaxy or who is a traitor or a loyalist. Unsure about the fate of Terra, Guilliman also decides to turn Ultramar into "Imperium Secundus", a second Imperium which siphons off resources and troops that could have gone toward fighting Horus or fortifying Terra.
• Rage Against the Reflection: Fulgrim does this several times, as his guilt over Ferrus Manus' death catches up with him in form of his brother's ghost appearing in various reflections.
• Rage Breaking Point: Ahriman, trying to defend Prospero against the devastation wrought by the Space Wolves, finds himself face-to-face with the Rune Priest Wyrdmake, one of the only Space Wolves he had found common ground with. Ahriman is so enraged by the perceived betrayal, he doesn't just kill Wyrdmake, he grabs him and forces his understanding of the Warp into the Space Wolf's mind (thus proving to Wyrdmake that, contrary to his insistence otherwise, his rune magic truly is just another variation of psychic ability). With the Rune Priest reeling from the revelation and confronted with the horror of the truth, Ahriman then tears the Space Wolf's soul from his body and hurls it into the Warp to be devoured by daemons.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Jaghatai Khan, full stop. Cut off from communications with the rest of the Imperium. Suddenly gets two diametrically opposing messages, one from Horus stating that his best friend Magnus just had his Legion wiped out by the Space Wolves, another from Dorn stating that Horus (the only other Primarch Jaghatai ever got along with) has turned traitor. What does Jaghatai do? Take a Third Option by visiting Prospero and seeing for himself what happened before deciding on a course of action.
  • The Emperor is thought to be this by most characters in-universe, but when he actually acts or his plans are revealed it's clear to the reader that he's an aversion, being something of a Jerkass with the Idiot Ball firmly glued to his hands and a tendency to intentionally prevent his legions from having effective intel or reconnaissance on their enemy.
• Rebellious Rebel: Cutting this off was the reason for the Isstvan III attack — and fomented it among the survivors. Also Garro, and the crew of the Eisenstein.
• Recurring Dreams:
  • Kasper Hawser has several over the course of Prospero Burns.
  • Obeirron and other Ultramarines stationed on Sotha have repeating dreams about various dangers that are about to befall them or Ultramar, thanks to Pharos' supernatural proprieties.
• Red Baron: A ton of characters have nicknames like this. To give a few more "to run away from really fast" examples:
  Angron: Red Angel
  Roboute Guilliman: The Avenging Son
  Rogal Dorn: Emperor's Praetorian, Unyielding One
  Leman Russ: Wolf King
  Jaghatai Khan: The Khagan, The Warhawk
  Perturabo: Lord of Iron, Hammer of Olympia
  Mortarion: The Death Lord, The Pale King
  Konrad Curze: Night Haunter
  Vulkan: Lord of Drakes
  Sevatar: Prince of Crows
  Alexis Polux: The Crimson Fist
  Sigismund: The Black Sword, The Emperor's Champion
  Erebus: Dark Apostle^note  To be fair, it's actually his rank, but he was the first to bear it , so it still counts
  Emperor: The Anathema, the Golden King, the Master of Mankind...
  
• The Remnant: After the Drop Site Massacre, the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard have been scattered and left leaderless, except for those Raven Guard who were saved with Corvus Corax. Isolated by warp storms, several mismatched groups of legionaries from the three aforementioned Legions have begun a series of guerrilla actions to inflict as much damage to the Traitor Legions as possible, going without orders and next to no support from anyone.
• Required Secondary Powers: While the Perpetuals have Resurrective Immortality, nothing protects them from remembering the experience of dying, which makes them go insane after some time, as Vulkan finds out the hard way.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Perpetuals, of which in story we meet Oll Persson, Alivia Sureka, John Grammaticus (who's a double winner, being a Perpetual psyker), Cyrene Valantion/Actae, and Vulkan. They can reform From a Single Cell and don't age, but every death makes them more insane.
• The Resenter: It's quite common.
  • Several primarchs resent Horus' ascension to Warmaster status, including the Lion, Perturabo, and Angron.
  • Most Legions resent the prissiness that the Emperor's Children exude.
  • Half of the Primarchs resent the Emperor for various reasons.
  • The Death Guard from Barbarus often resent Garro and the other Terrans in the legion despite their long service.
  • Lucius doesn't originally resent Tarvitz, but he starts doing so on Isstvan III when Tarvitz is accepted as the loyalist commander.
  • Perturabo resents everyone in general and Rogal Dorn in particular.
• The Reveal:
  • In Prospero Burns, the fact that Kaspar Hauser is possessed.
  • An internal one in Flight of the Eisenstein, when Dorn - and then the Imperium at large - find out about Horus' treachery.
  • In short story Reflection Crack'd, it turns out that Fulgrim has actually banished the daemon which had possessed him.
  • Another internal one in Deathfire, coming as quite a shock to Zytos, but probably not the readers. The body Zytos finds on the slopes of Mount Deathfire is not Numeon, but Vulkan reborn.
  • The true allegiance of the settlers in The Damnation of Pythos, although given their religiosity and the series it's in, it doesn't come as a huge surprise when they turn out to be Chaos cultists.
  • Additionally, the series also explains some of the things only referenced in the lore for the main game:
    • It's been stated that the Raven Guard Corax created using technology from the Primarch project mostly ended up as abominations. Deliverance Lost shows that this was because the Alpha Legion tampered with said technology and spiked it with daemon blood.
    • The novel Ruinstorm explains the tardiness of the Ultramarines and the Dark Angels to the Siege of Terra: the Legions had decided to act in Horus' territory, attacking worlds held by the traitors slow their advance and lure them back. By the time of the Siege, they were likely too far to arrive rapidly.
• Revenge:
  • Angron joins Horus' party to avenge his gladiator brothers and sisters who died because the Emperor didn't help them.
  • Magnus suspects that this is the reason why Lorgar is ravaging Ultramar.
• Revenge Before Reason: Played with depending on the individual in question:
  • Subverted with Sigismund in Mechanicum. While he really, really wants to lead the Imperial Fists on a revenge spree against the Dark Mechanicum and kill everything standing between him and Kelbor-Hal, Sigismund ultimately realizes that Rogal Dorn's orders to secure Space Marine arms and armor from Mars is more important. He's really displeased about it.
  • Played straight with Roboute Guilliman in Know No Fear. When he learns that Lorgar deliberately orchestrated the Campanile crash, Guilliman informs his subordinates that the Macragge's Honour is going straight for the Fidelitas Lex. When he's called on it, Guilliman tells Gage that he knows that it's tactically stupid to try and board the enemy's flagship this early, but he just doesn't care.
  • Also played straight with the Iron Hands in The Damnation of Pythos. The handfuls of Salamanders and Raven Guard accompanying them are well aware that staying behind to lay more mines is a risk, but ultimately the Iron Hands are too consumed by their hatred of the Emperor's Children to do the sensible thing and leave.
• Right Makes Might: The original Imperial Truth, as explained and invoked by name by the senior iterator (indoctrination/political officer and teacher of such) Kyril Sindermann in Horus Rising.
• Role Called: ADB's novel titles: The First Heretic, Betrayer, and Master of Mankind. Rather poetically, while they implicate a single notable character, multiple characters can have those novels' titles attributed to them.
• Royal Brat: The Emperor's sons leave much to be desired in terms of maturity. See all that resentment and pride etc.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The Loyalist Primarchs are downright terrifying when they start letting out the anger the Heresy is causing them on Traitor Space Marines.
  • Ferrus Manus in Fulgrim. When the traitor legions begin their false retreat during the Drop Site Massacre, he refuses Corax and Vulkan's advice to fall back to rejoin the other four Legions, and instead orders the Iron Hands to advance while the Raven Guard and Salamanders fall back to resupply, all while grabbing any traitor Legionary who tries to run away and taking them apart with his hands. It helps that those hands are made of metal.
  • Corvus Corax in The First Heretic. His Legionaries being cut down by the thousands, so he tears through dozens of daemon possessed Word Bearers like a hot knife through butter, and would have killed Lorgar if not for Konrad Curze. All while shrieking—literally, shrieking like a bird of prey—in rage. Lorgar is utterly horrified to see Corax so enraged.
  • Roboute Guilliman in Know No Fear. The stoic master of warfare as a science goes absolutely wild on Word Bearers trying to board his flagship, beating them to death with nothing but his fists. That's right, no Gauntlets of Ultramar! He does all this while on the hull of the ship without wearing a helmet.
  • Sanguinius in Fear To Tread. With Ka'Bandha and Kyriss responsible for the deaths of hundreds of his sons, he throws Ka'Bandha through a warp portal and decapitates Kyriss, both of them with ease.
  • Vulkan in Vulkan Lives. When the four Legions turn on the loyalists, Vulkan charges ahead of the Salamanders and uses his hammer to send Rhinos and Land Raiders flying through the air.

S-Z

• Salt the Earth: This is a specialty of the Dark Angels and the Death Guard. The Dark Angels have the Dreadwing, their "dirty tricks department"; the Marines assigned to the Dreadwing are equipped with sinister and forbidden armaments, such as rad missiles and grenades, phosphex flamethrowers and assault cannons, vortex weapons, and Exterminatus-class munitions. They are unleashed whenever an enemy is to be totally annihilated, and the aftereffects of their weapons all but ensure that no one can live where they have fought for a long time. The Death Guard, meanwhile, specialize in chemical and biological warfare, and use weapons that even the Dreadwing won't touch, such as bio-phage bombs, cullgene gas, and chem-flamers. They are specifically noted to have left a lot of dead worlds behind them.
• Sanity Slippage Song: Fulgrim's Legion has one, capping off their descent into madness, by attending one in the form of the "opera" Maraviglia, which was literally designed from the ground up to cause sensory overload in the most painful manner possible. It causes the audience, comprised of most of the Legion and many of their human attendants and already deep in Slaanesh's pocket, to go into an orgy of violence and sex. It ends when the event inadvertently summons daemons who join in. The Emperor's Children pick up the instruments invented just for the piece from the stage, unmodified, and use them as destructive weapons.
• Saved by Canon: Named Chaos Space Marines characters appear in this series, so it's a foregone conclusion that they'll survive past the ending. Lucius gets killed at the climax of Angel Exterminatus, then wakes up in Fabius's Apothecarion, both of them confused as to how; the death and resurrection don't line up with the specifics of the body-snatching immortality power that Lucius later possesses.
  • Zigzagged with a few villains. Julius Kaesoron dies, but appears in Wrath of Iron having been resurrected as a daemon prince.
• Savage Wolves: The Space Wolves Legion is (in)famous for its savagery on the battlefield, to the extent that even other Legions consider them The Dreaded.
• Scenery Gorn: Most of the authors revel in describing the horrible messes that are left behind whenever the Legions fight or whenever Chaos gets involved. Fear to Tread, in particular, goes into great detail on how horrible things went in the Signus Cluster when the eyes of the Dark Gods were turned on it.
  • If you're reading The End and the Death and come to a chapter titled "Fragments", chances are you're in for this. The first of these, which is the second chapter of the first volume, opens with a single sentence that tells you exactly how Terra is doing:
  They have crucified Titans along the Ultimate Wall.
• Scenery Porn: The End and the Death: Volume I has a long sequence where Malcador describes the Imperial Throne Room in intricate detail, including all its complex machinery, its art and architecture, and all the people within it and what they're doing in that moment.
• Scry vs. Scry: How the fight between Curze and Sanguinius pans out; with both being able to see the future, they both know that ultimately, their duel is futile, as neither is fated to die there and then.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • In Mechanicum, the Void Dragon, one of the most powerful of the C'tan, is buried deep within Mars. Yes, the entire planet is its can. If it ever wakes up...
  • In Fallen Angels, the Ouroboros is buried underneath the surface of Caliban.
• Secret Circle of Secrets: Loken's induction into the Mournival is somewhat cultish in its mystique, which makes him very uncomfortable in the face of the Imperium's devotion to secularism and empiricism. The others laugh off his concerns, telling Loken it's just a fun bit of theater and not something he should read much into. In hindsight, this may not be as true as they believed at the time.
  • The Dark Angels have many such circles, typically small groups of legionaries with knowledge of how to defeat specific enemies or who are tasked with securing especially dangerous weapons or repositories of forbidden lore. The Legion's organization is so complicated and hush-hush that even the Alpha Legion can't infiltrate them, but it also means that they come off as secretive assholes to everyone else in the Imperium.
• Secret War: The War in the Webway. After Magnus destroyed the Webway gate beneath the Imperial Palace, an army of daemons tries to invade the Imperial Palace through the Webway and the Emperor has to fight them off with the Legio Custodes and other forces spirited away from the frontline. It is arguably an even more important war than what is happening with the Primarchs, as the Ruinous Powers have a direct access to the heart of the Imperium. The War in the Webway is kept secret from all for several reasons, chiefly because no one wants Terra's populace to freak out if they're told the Palace itself is beset by daemons.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Horus rebels because he has a vision wherein the Emperor becomes a God-Emperor and he and his brothers are forgotten, and wants to prevent such a thing. His actions lead to the Emperor being enshrined upon the Golden Throne as an object of worship.
• Serial Escalation: It's Warhammer 40,000, which has been using this for decades, so it's only natural it starts happening. Specifically, this is the pre-Heresy hat of the World Eaters Legion: to be willing to go one step further than the enemy will.
• Serrated Blade of Pain: The signature weapon of the Blood Angels' Fifth Company are serrated combat knives used for flaying. They end up being the first Space Marines of the Flesh Tearers chapter.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • In The Damnation of Pythos, elements of the Shattered Legions are trapped on the world of Pythos as a daemon is being summoned into the material plane. Despite their best efforts, they fail to stop the daemon and commit their last strength to warn Terra about the daemonic threat in the Pandorax system. However, the message is too incoherent and isn't taken seriously by the secular astropaths of Terra, making the protagonists' efforts moot.
  • The novella Cybernetica features Dravian Klayde, an aspirant Techmarine of the Raven Guard who becomes one of Malcador's Knights Errant. To retake Mars, Klayde formulates a plan that will enable him to purge Mars of the traitors without destroying the facilities. However, his plan fails miserably at the last step and Mars remains occupied by the Dark Mechanicum. Dorn, Fabricator General Kane and Malcador themselves recognize that the whole operation amounted to nothing, but that it was worth a try.
• Shoot the Dog: About five get shot in the last quarter or so of False Gods, to show Horus Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The Damnation of Pythos ends with all the viewpoint characters dead and none of their actions having an effect on the rest of the ongoing story.
• Shoot Your Mate: If they're possessed by a daemon, there are few other choices.
• Sibling Rivalry:
  • Present among the Primarchs. When Horus was appointed Warmaster, he believed that only Sanguinius, Rogal Dorn, Fulgrim, Mortarion, and Lorgar genuinely supported the decision, with the others doing so reluctantly. Petronella Vivar is shocked when Horus tells her this, but he responds that they may be family, but they're still siblings, and all siblings try to outdo the other to impress their parents.
  • The Lion and the Wolf have a particularly violent spat over engagement procedure. Dorn and Perturabo have a... disagreement about the defensibility of the Imperial Palace (oh irony). Roboute Guilliman, Paragon of the Standard Procedure, outright denounced Alpharius, Master of Unorthodox Tactics and Decentralised Leadership.
• The Siege: The Horus Heresy ultimately culminates in the Siege of Terra, the most epic battle of the galaxy. No less than 3 Astartes legions and their Primarchs, the Imperial Army, Legio Custodes, Sisters of Silence and 3 Titan Legions defend Terra, cradle of humanity and currently most fortified place in the galaxy against the might of Horus, 7 Astartes legions and their Primarchs, their own armies, the Dark Mechanicum and a host of Chaos daemons. The loyalists find themselves outnumbered and prepare to defend every inch of their planet while unbeknownst to them, the Ultramarines, Dark Angels and the Vlka Fenryka will be coming to the rescue. For his part, Horus aims to break the defences before the reinforcements can come.
• Sinister Minister:
  • In the backstory, Cardinal Tang, who is Hitler in the distant past/far future of the 29th Millennium. Any given Chaos cultist might also qualify.
  • Also pretty much the hat of the entire Word Bearers Legion, all being crazy religious zealots. Within their own ranks, Erebus (and all other Chaplains) carry this rank, Kor Phaeron serves as the military commander, and Lorgar supersedes both, being the supreme military and spiritual leader, though he delegates and otherwise serves as (from a certain perspective) an enlightened and benevolent Sorcerous Overlord who is nontheless usually busy with his own research and projects.
• Smug Super: The Night Lords Legion with regards to their human "allies". In flashback to the Great Crusade in Vulkan Lives, after pacifying a planet with the Salamanders Legion where Konrad Curze went behind Vulkan's back and wiped out the population of the the planet's capital, the Night Lords take time to intimidate the Imperial Army officers and the Administratum adepts. Half of the Salamanders' Pyre Guards want to drag the Night Lords into the practice cages and see how they would do on even ground. The other half of the Pyre Guard just wants to turn their flamers on the Night Lords.
• Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: The crew of the starship Eisenstein pull one of these using a nearby moon to break away from Horus' fleet, jump to warp, and Bring News Back of the Warmaster's treachery. The only ship able to pursue, the battleship Terminus Est, is unable to match the carefully-plotted manoeuvre, and must break off before becoming trapped in the moon's gravity well.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Malcador does that to Garro when the latter goes AWOL to do some investigating, and going by the Space Marine's thoughts, this isn't the first time. Garro's theory on this is that Malcador never actually leaves the Palace, but contacts people telepahically and manifests an image of himself for the purpose of a talk.
• The Stoic: Rogal Dorn is an unflappable and impassive personality, taking most of what happens with grim resolve. This being said, when his stoicism cracks, he goes off with the power of a nuclear bomb.
• Storming the Castle: Ironically happening during the Siege of Terra. In Warhawk, Jaghatai Khan has had enough of fighting on the defensive and mobilizes the White Scars as well as a hundred tank regiments to storm the Lion's Gate spaceport to retake it from the Death Guard. By retaking the space port, Jaghatai Khan hopes to turn its turrets against the Chaos fleet and also offer the incoming reinforcements a fast way to deploy into the Palace. However, the space port proves extremely difficult to assault because the Death Guards have dug in and corrupted the place, making it fatal to even breathe the unfiltered air inside, hence the need for fully sealed tanks.
• A Storm Is Coming: Before the occurrences of Isstvan III's destruction, the warp is turbulent and heralds a great turbulence in reality.
• Story Arc:
  • The first books focus on the gradual corruption of Horus Lupercal and his personal fall to Chaos, as well as that of his legion. At the same time, the books are about Garviel Loken becoming independant from his corrupt legion and trying to save the few human friends he has in his fleet.
  • The Dark Angels, and more precisely the librarian Zahariel, get a story arc which exposes how the Calibanite Dark Angels that have been exiled on their homeworld fall to Chaos.
  • Another story arc presents the Imperium Secundus, a backup plan that Guilliman enacts to preserve at least some of the Imperium until he can determine Terra's status. It narrates how Guilliman and then Lion el'Jonson and Sanguinius try to cooperate to manage this new Imperium while Curze and the Night Lords attack.
  • The White Scars get their own story arc as Jaghatai Khan, who was isolated from the war, learns what has happened and tries to make the best decisions possible in an impossible situation.
  • Several loyalist Space Marines go on to become Knights Errant, agents of Malcador the Sigillite who perform specific tasks in the shadows, from assassination attempts to recruiting other legionaries who will become the Grey Knights.
  • After the Drop Site Massacre, the Shattered Legions also have minor story arcs about coming to terms with their losses and working to enact vengeance on the traitors.
• The Strategist: Besides the Primarchs being peerless generals, this is part of the hat of the Ultramarines Legion: go into every battle with a theoretical (a sound understanding or reasonable extrapolation of the situation) and a practical (a solid plan of attack).
• Stuff Blowing Up: All over the place - this is Warhammer 40,000 after all - but special mention goes to Know No Fear. The initial phase of the Battle of Calth has Dan Abnett channeling Michael Bay, with a commandeered ship utterly destroying Calth's space dock, a twelve-kilometer grand cruiser crashing into a city and demolishing it, and the destruction of a low-orbit depot causing a group of Ultramarines to experience a rain of main battle tanks. It's all described in loving detail, and it is awesome.
• Submersible Spaceship: In the prologue, some of the fake Emperor's six hundred warships rise out of his planet's oceans to confront Horus' fleet.
• Super-Soldier: Considering that this is the age of the Space Marine Legions, this is emphasized a lot. However, the Primarchs exceed all expectations and then some. Even more scary are the Thunder Warriors, the predecessors to the Space Marines. Not a lot is known about them, but the two that survived up to the Horus Heresy are considered badass even by Space Marine standards. Whilst the Space Marines were created with the idea of being an elite fighting brotherhood united in arms for the good of mankind, the Thunder Warriors were brutal, borderline psychopaths with loyalty solely to the Emperor, but not his ideals. Fortunately, they had a limited lifespan (left ambiguous as to whether this was intentional) and were repaid with a bloody post-victory pogrom after the conquest of Terra.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: John Grammaticus is, among other things, a high-functioning logokine, which is apparently a psyker whose powers have an emphasis on spoken language. While he has shown several of the standard psychic powers such as sensing psychic phenomena and a mild telepathic ability, he can tell when someone's lying, tell precisely where someone is from based on their accent, understand languages he's never heard before or use his voice to trick people into something they aren't seeing.
• Switching P.O.V.: All the novels rotate between point of views of the different characters. Usually, the story will follow the point of view of a Space Marine and that of an ordinary human saddled with the Legions (remembrancers, other soldiers and the like) and more rarely the story is told from the views of the Primarchs themselves. It allows the depiction of all the aspects of war, from epic battles between Space Marines, their support staff, and civilian refugees having to flee said epic battles. This allows for some dark irony too. For instance, in The Lost and Damned a battle is shown from the point of view of a conscript, where he and his company fight tooth and nail to repel a horde of mutants and almost dies in the process. Then, the point of view switches to Captain Raldoron of the Blood Angels, who sees this battle as a minor breach.
• Talking to the Dead:
  • Garro in The Flight of the Eisenstein.
  • Curze often chats with corpses he keeps in his room.
  • One short story features Horus complaining to Ferrus' skull about the difficulty of managing his increasingly deranged and unruly brothers while also being in charge of one side of a galactic civil war.
• Talk to the Fist: Loken, Combat Pragmatist. Sadly, this Only Works Once...
• Tear Off Your Face: In "Fear to Tread", Horus does not take Erebus jerking him around kindly, and so slices off Erebus's face and keeps it as a trophy. Sadly, Erebus seems to have regrown it in the last ten thousand years.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Sometimes, it seems like the only thing keeping the Traitor Legions together is their Primarchs, and the only thing keeping the Traitor Primarchs together is Horus. Corax forms part of his strategy around it, believing that if the Raven Guard attacks behind the traitors' lines and slows their advance, they can delay the inevitable attack on Terra, causing cracks to form between the Traitor Legions and make them turn on each other. It happens, just after the Siege of Terra.
  • By The Solar War, it is clear that Horus is the only thing holding the traitor primarchs together, and even his unnatural charisma isn't quite doing the trick anymore. Lorgar, Curze, and Alpharius are out of the picture for one reason or another, Magnus is doing his own thing, and whenever the other traitor primarchs convene for strategy meetings, Angron, Fulgrim, and Perturabo spend as much time insulting each other as they do discussing the Siege.
• Tele-Frag: Happens to several Ultramarines when a fifty-Marine kill team boards an orbital platform to kill Kor Phaeron and restore Calth's orbital grid. One is left a puddle of sludge. Two are fused into the wall and are killed instantly. One is fused to the floor, and it's shown to be so painful that a normally stoic Space Marine starts shrieking in pain; Guilliman has no option except the Emperor's peace. As just four were lost, the teleport is considered a success.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Emperor has a huge case of this regarding what is really lurking inside the Warp. It ends up backfiring spectacularly.
• Took a Level in Cynic: The story as a whole shows how the Imperium went from championing enlightenment and being relatively egalitarian into the theocratic empire that worships the Emperor as a god in the main Warhammer 40,000 timeline. It's best highlighted by the story of Euphrati Keeler, the founder of the Imperial Faith: at the beginning of the series, she turns to worshipping the Emperor after encountering an actual daemon, shattering her world view that gods and daemons do not exist. Her conversion leaves her with some odd mannerisms, but she's mostly a friendly person who provides support to several characters when they really need it. By the time the Siege of Terra rolls around, Euphrati has started whipping up refugees into mobs that are suicidally charging toward the Chaos forces because there aren't enough resources for everyone in the refugee camps. Tellingly, this is the point where the Imperium's association with skulls really takes off, as several refugees take skulls with them as they March to their doom.
• The Starscream:
  • As of The Primarchs, Omegon is plotting behind Alpharius's back.
  • In Slaves to Darkness, Lorgar tries to take command of the traitor forces from Horus on Ullanor, having realized that Horus's refusal to submit fully to the Chaos Gods will cost them victory. Horus kicks the crap out of him and orders him to make tracks.
• Thicker Than Water:
  • Horus and Sanguinius spend quite some time trying to convince each other to switch sides. Additionally, when the former finds out that Erebus tried to have Sanguinius possessed, he rips his face off. When the two brothers meet for the final time during the Siege of Terra, they both admit that they're glad to see each other again, even in spite of all that's happened.
  • In Betrayer, when Angron is buried under tons of rubble, Lorgar teleports into thick of the battle and starts digging him out, nearly completely ignoring the fight raging around him.
  • Invoked by Magnus when asked why he would intervene to save a loyalist Primarch. He claims that even in times of madness, some values should be honoured, and he wants to do something for Vulkan one last time.
  • Defied by Leman Russ, who's perfectly willing to kill his brothers if their father orders it so. It's implied that the two missing Primarchs fell by his hand, and when he's sent to kill Magnus, he has no qualms about it.
• Time Crash: In The End and the Death, Terra is being swallowed into the Warp and one of the side effects is that time ceases to function normally. This causes various effects such as characters suddenly finding themselves in place where they should have taken hours to reach by foot normally. Malcador estimates that all those on Terra are trapped in a perpetual "now" which ironically is giving the loyalists time to change the outcome of the war.
• Title Drop: Many times. Of note is "Vulkan lives", the very first two words of Vulkan Lives.
• Tragic Villain: The series has a number of them, beginning with Horus who was the Emperor's favorite son but then succumbed to the pressure of being Warmaster and was manipulated by being shown a future where he would be shunned by the same Imperium he was building. Other Primarchs were also driven into the traitor camp against their better natures, and some of the Legions were corrupted by their sheer loyalty toward their Primarchs. However, these villains usually stop being tragic after a certain point because of their continuous exposure to Chaos.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The dominant sentiment of loyalists against Horus' side. Those siding with the Imperium usually uphold the values of loyalty to the Emperor and of brotherhood, especially between legionaries, and they absolutely cannot fathom that anyone betraying the Imperium could be anything more than an enemy that must die. The treachery and the backstabbing that comes with it enrages several loyalist characters.
• Trigger Phrase: People's names in Prospero Burns.
• To Be Lawful or Good: The Emperor's Children have to decide whether to follow their orders and colonize some exceptionally beautiful planets, ruining their beauty, or to pass them by. After it's revealed that the planets are Eldar Maiden Worlds and Eldrad accuses Horus of treason, Fulgrim takes a third option and virus bombs the planets into nothing.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: While generally considered a moral paragon by the standards of Warhammer 40,000, the novels show that the Emperor was a bigger prick than anyone realized. Emps really did not stop to think too much about how ordering people to do things and never telling them why might turn out in the long run.
  • It shows in The First Heretic. It was established that the Emperor chastised Lorgar for his religious zeal, but what wasn't established was how he made his point before doing so. He ordered the Ultramarines to completely wipe out a compliant city that the Word Bearers had converted to his worship. These people were innocent of any wrongdoing save worshiping the Emperor, and were destroyed solely to provide an example of what would happen to those who engaged in religious practices.
  • Horus' sorrow and growing insecurity is caused by the Emperor up and going home to Terra and telling him, his favoured son, absolutely nothing about why.
  • In Mechanicum, he appears on Mars, demands the planet's allegiance, seals a tomb of ancient technology and erases the Fabricator-General's memory of where it is - but not, for some baffling reason, his memory of him being a giant dick to him. Guess who leads over half of Mars into rebellion a couple hundred years later?
• Tomato in the Mirror: The conclusion of Scorched Earth.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Lorgar and Magnus's grimoire.
• Too Dumb to Live: The people on Horus's ship when he's brought back from Davin, critically wounded. Yes, the entire point of the scene is to point out that the Mournival and the Luna Wolves as a whole are starting to lose their grip on reason, and there's some well-deserved My God, What Have I Done?, but the slaughter that's supposed to be the edge of the Moral Event Horizon for the legion wouldn't have happened if hundreds of worried people hadn't flooded the clearly demarcated path between the docking bay and the hospital and continued to push in to try to see Horus's wounded body themselves, even as the raging Marines went from shoving people to punching them, stepping on them, and assaulting them with weapons.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: A lot of advanced, progressive, multi-species polities that buck the usual Imperial policy are shown to exist throughout the Horus Heresy series, most notably the Interex, the Golden Apostles, the Diasporex (who were democratic to boot), Ibsen, Kharaatan, and the Autocracy of Szaeyr. They're all inevitably exterminated, usually by the Imperium. The destruction of the Interex is particularly notable as Horus intended to adopt progressive policies similar to theirs for the Imperium itself, something that obviously never comes to pass.
• Tranquil Fury: Inverted by Angron, who drives himself into such huge fits of rage that it turns him insensate to the point that it's almost a trance, which are the only times he gets Zen-like periods of peace.
  • The Iron Hands in The Damnation of Pythos are too icily relentless and mechanical to go berserk, meaning that they manifest their rage in the form of cold ruthlessness and volleys of bolt rounds.
• Treacherous Spirit Chase: In Know No Fear, one of the soldiers is periodically visited by his bride urging him to come to her. Soon enough, it turns out that "she" is some sort of Chaos-thing luring him into cultists' trap, and he's saved only because his friend sees the "bride" for what she really is: a terrifying monster.
• Treachery Cover Up: Erebus, and the whole of the Word Bearers.
• Turn Coat: Half the basis of the plot is half of the Imperium doing this.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Fallen Angels alternates between following Zahariel on Caliban and Nemiel on Diamat.
  • Also in Nemesis, where circumstance pulls the Officio Assassinorum execution force and Erebus's assassin Spear to the same planet, where they end up fighting to eliminate one another from the war.
• The Un Favourite:
  • Nobody likes Perturabo. For all of his personal grievances against Rogal Dorn and the Emperor, he never really learned to deal with them in an emotionally healthy way. And, of course, he's a dick.
  • Konrad Curze is also like this, as well as Alpharius to an extent, due to their sneaky, secretive natures. Although to his credit, Alpharius doesn't give a damn in the slightest. Curze, also because he's openly a violent psychopath and clearly undergoing Sanity Slippage, and he's obsessively pursuing more than one Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • A rare loyalist example with the Khan. Apart from Horus and Magnus, none of the other Primarchs especially like or trust him due to his distant nature and isolationist behaviour. Even the Emperor admits (a little regretfully) that this is the case, although it was intentional.
• The Unfettered:
  • It doesn't matter what the Emperor asks, the Rout will carry it out; that's what they do. Angron calls Russ out on this.
  • When the Horus Heresy breaks out, Malcador lays out the foundation of the future Inquisition, gathering promising candidates who will ruthlessly purge Chaotic taint from the Imperium. Among those is the Librarian Dio Promus, who is tasked with seeking other Astartes who could be recruited and executing any candidate he contacts but finds unworthy... even legionaries that would otherwise be loyal. He never regrets the acts and is killed by some Space Wolves when they learn it.
  • Subverted with some of the loyalist Primarchs. Most of them are tempted to act as ruthlessly as possible in the war, notably when faced with daemons. Lion El'Jonson develops a nasty habit of using overwhelming force and Exterminatus on all tainted worlds; Guilliman is tempted to study and use the anathames against the forces of Chaos. However, both refuse to let these urges dominate them and notably come to the conclusion that extreme ruthlessness will drive the loyalist forces apart anyway.
• Unfriendly Fire: False Gods has a particularly nasty example which is only revealed after the act due to the chaos of battle, when Horus has the general of his Imperial Army auxilia killed.
• The Unmasqued World: The Imperial Truth couldn't hold up against all the daemons and Chaos gods running around and messing with people.
• Unstoppable Rage: The Blood Angels go into the Red Thirst en masse when Ka'Bandha kills five hundred legionaries and the psychic backlash sends Sanguinius into a coma. Unfortunately, it works too well, to the point that Daemons of Khorne are unable to fight off the Blood Angels.
  • When Sanguinius dies and the Black Rage strikes the IX Legion for the first time, they tear through absolutely everything in their way, fighting so savagely that the traitor forces they encounter often break and flee in sheer panic.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In Know No Fear, Captain Ventanus notes that Sergeant Anchise's efforts to rally and redirect the remnants of the Ultramarines' 111th and 112th companies would normally become the stuff of legend. On Calth, it's simply another man's struggle before his death. It becomes much more interesting when those two companies become the backbone of the group that ends up reinforcing Ventanus in the end of the book.
• Unwitting Pawn: They turn up regularly. In particular, the Iron Hands spend most of The Damnation of Pythos doing exactly what Madail wanted them to do.
• The Uriah Gambit: False Gods sees Horus use the commotion of battle to kill an army leader.
• Utopia: The Great Crusade and the Imperium of Man in general seek to achieve this. Alpha Legion Astartes have a heyday philosophically playing around with this concept.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Horus takes over half the Imperium's military before anyone knows he's a Chaos-fallen traitor.
• Villainous Breakdown: Several:
  • Horus has one in Galaxy in Flames when the virus bombing fails to kill the loyalist legionaries. It's not a problem for him, as he's ready to engage in a good-old fashioned orbital bombardment, but what gets him really pissed-off is when Angron takes the World Eaters down to Isstvan III and decides to finish the loyalists off "the old fashioned way", all without even telling him. Pissed that Angron still refuses to recognize his authority as Warmaster, Horus is nearly ready to go through with the bombardment and wipe out one of the Legions who side with him, and is only barely talked out of it by Erebus.
  • Two in Fear to Tread:
    • Kyriss goes absolutely insane when Meros takes the Ragefire into himself so that Sanguinius doesn't. He (she?) begins screaming in tongues and begins shouting that the Blood Angels are merely pieces on the board with no right to rebel. Sanguinius ends up decapitating it in the midst of its breakdown.
    • After spending the entire series as the most calm, collected, and unemotional of Chessmasters, Erebus goes off his rocker and verbally rips into Horus for interfering with the trap for the Blood Angels and courting the displeasure of the Chaos Gods, only realizing his mistake after he had let loose verbally on the Warmaster. Horus's response is actually pretty tame for a Chaos corrupted Primarch: he skins Erebus's face off and reminds him that it's him who's commanding the rebellion, not the Chaos Gods.
  • Betrayer reveals that Erebus's breakdown started even earlier. After screwing up the attack on Calth (earning a mocking dismissal by Lorgar), Erebus gets back up to his old manipulations again. His ego as "Destiny's Hand" is shattered when Lorgar tells Khârn that Erebus was responsible for murdering his best friend. Khârn then utterly curbstomps Erebus in a duel to the death. Erebus cannot actually mentally comprehend that this is happening to him before he escapes.
  • Ingethel has one in Aurelian during Lorgar's trip into the Eye of Terror, when Khorne decides to test Lorgar in hand-to-hand combat with a Bloodthirster. To give an example of how bad this is, Ingethel, who is a Daemon Princess, is reduced to a sobbing wreck, repeatedly saying "Kharnath has violated the accord, Kharnath has violated the accord".
• Vision Quest: The Temple of the Serpent Lodge sends one to Horus that radically alters his motivation and then him on a quest of conquest.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Revealed to be the specialty of the Vanus Temple^note This was originally an in-joke on the part of the developers, as "vanus" is latin for "empty", meaning that in the 41st millennium, there was no 6th temple.
• War Is Hell: Oh yes, for all the civilians and human soldiers caught in an all-out war between Legions. The ordinary humans have to contend with the destruction of their homes, catastrophic events started by the traitor Legions (e.g. Calth, whose sun is tampered with until it is emitting lethal amounts of radiation), the usual suspects of hunger, sickness, fear, and sometimes being the victims of creatures of Chaos too.
• The War Room: Many battleships and fortresses are equipped with strategiums, where officers meet, military strategies are decided and where all the information that sensors, spies and troops can gather are assembled so that the Primarchs and human generals in them can process them and decide accordingly. Two recurring examples are the Vengeful Spirit's strategium and the Imperial Palace's Grand Borealis strategium.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Usually, if asked this, most traitor marines reply with "Yes" and a bolter to the face. Implied by the Eldar that, were he to win, Horus's grief and remorse would overcome him, causing him to declare war on everyone left, in shame. Perhaps most disturbingly of all is that Horus going mad with grief and slaughtering the entire Imperium of Man... might be the best possible outcome of the Heresy!
• We Can Rebuild Him: The Iron Hands are fond of this trope. In the short story The Keys of Hel we see a group that goes beyond the usual bounds, resurrecting dead warriors with cybernetics. Subverted with Ferrus Manus. In Old Earth, a faction of Iron Fathers have taken his metal hands and deluded themselves into wanting to rebuild a golem of their primarch with these as a catalyst. Vulkan prompty smashes the thing, and the hands to pieces.
• We ARE Struggling Together: In Slaves to Darkness, the traitor legions are now clearly falling victim to grave infighting. Lorgar forces Fulgrim to join the conflict while planning to overthrow Horus in the name of Chaos. Perturabo has to beat up Angron to get him to follow along too; meanwhile the Sons of Horus are at each others' throats regarding how to deal with a wounded and unconscious Horus. Magnus is technically part of the traitor forces, but is busy doing his own thing, and Alpharius appears just long enough to hand off data on Terra's defenses before disappearing altogether.
• Weather Dissonance: It's a beautiful day on Calth when tanks start falling from the sky.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Ferrus Manus, who appears as a major character in a total of one novel and two short stories set before that. Fairly justified since his biggest role in the Heresy was dying during the first major battle between loyalist and traitor forces (or the second battle, depending on who you ask).
• We Have Reserves: The Iron Warriors are all about this, with their own warriors but even more so with mortal troops. The Solar War sees them set about space forts with mass conveyors full of convicts and gangers, initially in a drugged sleep but then doused with chemicals to provoke a killing frenzy. By the time the ships dock, tens of thousands of gangers are dead, and it makes no difference to the outcome of the fighting that then happens in the fort. Then the Iron Warriors dispose of the gangers by opening the fort to the vacuum.
• Weirdness Censor: In A Thousand Sons, Ahriman notices the number seven being a recurring element with Mortarion and his Legion, while he seems not to notice the recurrence of the number nine within his own legion which was a running theme of that particular book.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: At least half the Primarchs are like this, notably Konrad Curze, who sees himself as having become evil for the Emperor. Too bad the Emperor is kind of a dick.
• Wham Episode: When The Emperor makes an appearance, it usually has huge repercussions for the greater narrative.
  • A Thousand Sons, which has The Emperor's decree against Magnus at Nikaea. It's these events that will lead to Magnus and the Thousand Sons turning against the Imperium.
  • The First Heretic, which shows the Emperor at his worst. He castigates Lorgar for his slow progress in the Crusade and promulgating the early Imperial Cult. He does this by having the city of Monarchia, considered by Lorgar to be his crowning achievment, destroyed by the Ultramarines, Lorgar's most bitter rivals. After that, he browbeats Lorgar and leaves without much more fanfare.
  • The Outcast Dead, which (besides the Wham Line below) has Kai Zulane's vision imply that there is a win condition for humanity against the Chaos Gods.
  • Vengeful Spirit, which is a Wham Episode for the series exploring why the Emperor is so powerful and empowering a now completely evil Horus to a similar extent.
  • Master of Mankind comes under this. The Emperor rises from the Golden Throne just long enough to turn the tide of the Webway War by singlehandedly obliterating an army of daemons, revealing just why the Chaos gods are so afraid of him.
  • In "The End and the Death: Volume II", it's revealed that the fifth Chaos God, the Dark King is indeed ascendant, and it's in fact the Emperor. He's been gorging himself on Warp energy to give him the strength to vanquish Horus, but rejects it after being convinced by Ollanius, Garviel, and Leetu, and removes his compassion, in form of a "child like a star"..
• Wham Line:
  • In The Outcast Dead:
    Kai Zulane: But you're going to die.
    The Emperor: I know.
  • In The Unremembered Empire, there are the words on Vulkan's coffin, which Deathfire reveals is one of Vulkan's epithets.
    Written in flowing script were the words "The Unbound Flame".
  • From The Last Son of Prospero, spoken by Revuel Arvida after merging with a shard of Magnus, revealing that his true destiny is to become Janus, first Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights.
    "Know me by the name I always had," he said. "Call me Ianius."
  • In Sons of the Selenar, Nykona Sharrowkyn is holed up on a space station with an artifact called the Magna Mater taken from the Selenar gene-cults to keep it out of Traitor hands. Before he slips into suspended animation to await rescue, he checks a nearby sign for what the station he's on is called: Sangprimus Portum, revealing the Magna Mater to be the container of pure Primarch DNA that Belisarius Cawl will use to create the Primaris Space Marines after the Heresy.
  • In The End and the Death Volume I, mention is repeatedly made of "the Dark King", implied to be a fifth Chaos God potentially born from the end of the Heresy. Then four voices, implied to be the Chaos Gods, begin laughing and chanting the name of the Dark King, a line which turns everything on its head.
    It is not Horus Lupercal.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Deathfire is pretty clearly based on The Odyssey.
• A Wizard Did It: An in universe example in Prospero Burns. Kasper's mind is altered by an alien force. When a Rune Priest enters his mind and finds details of Horus's betrayal, Leman Russ assumes that the prophecy was just implanted by the Thousand Sons as a ploy. He doesn't understand how that would work.
• Wicked Cultured: Horus is a nice guy. Fulgrim is a patron of the arts. Magnus really likes books and libraries. Lorgar is said to be at heart more visionary and philosopher than warrior, as much as a guy with a giant spiked mace can be. Surprisingly, Perturabo has a solid grounding in Olympian classical myth and is capable of incredible feats of civilian architecture such as theatres and arenas. Russ has read Lorgar's writings in philosophy. Dorn likes to work on architecture projects in his spare time. Even Angron has the occasional moment where he accurately points out that by any philosophical and moral standpoint, the Emperor is a warmongering, enslaving, mono-dominant tyrant.
• With Due Respect: As their Primarch goes snooker-loopy, their loyalist soldiers still ask, politely, if they're quite sure of what they're doing.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: None of the traitor Primarchs are all quite there before selling out to the Ruinous Powers. Some, like Fulgrim and Horus, are given brief moments of lucidity to be horrified at what they've become, before the veil falls back down.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Seeing Angron reminisce about his comrades who had just recently died, punctuated by groans and snarls of despair, is pretty heart-wrenching.
• Words Can Break My Bones:
  • Warsingers use their (heavily implied to be Slaaneshi-given) powers to create deadly magical effects through their singing. Also, Eidolon and the Noise Marines.
  • Invoked in Prospero Burns, where in a flashback we are re-introduced to Abnett's reality warping proto-language, Enuncia. Using it murders someone and causes the invoker to bleed from the mouth This becomes a Chekhov's Gun when Kasper Hawser uses the word he heard Murza say to to blow up a daemon's head.
• World With A Dark Secret: The Emperor locked the Void Dragon on Mars sometime in the 10th or 11th century (of the second millennium) because he knew that technologically inclined humans would one day settle it, and proximity to the Dragon would inspire them to design things for humanity's betterment.
  • The settlers in The Damnation of Pythos are led by Davinite priests.
• Worth It:
  • The Butcher's Nails leave those who've been implanted with them mentally unstable, highly aggressive, and unable to properly sleep. However, it gives Angron a type of serenity that he values.
  • In Know No Fear Lorgar says that the entire Battle of Calth was worth it just to see Roboute Guilliman lose his temper.
• World Gone Mad: In Know No Fear, after being told about the Horus Heresy, Roboute Guilliman says that either Lorgar is insane, or the universe has gone mad. The sad thing about Warhammer 40,000' is that the first part of Guilliman's statement is true; the scary thing the second part of Guilliman's statement might be true.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian:
  • Initially played straight, but as the books go on, things change like during the virus bombing of Isstvan III. They are Space Marines, after all.
  • Most commonly averted by the World Eater/War Hounds Legion; Angron is depicted pretty consistently as undiscriminating when choosing targets.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Possibly the most major plot point in False Gods, referred to in most other works. A stab wound with a primitive blade shouldn't even slow down a legionary, let alone a Primarch, and should heal rapidly, yet when Eugen Temba stabs Horus in the shoulder with the Anathame in False Gods, his superhuman metabolism refuses to repair the damage or successfully fight the plague in the wound. Erebus tells the Mournival that the Serpent Lodge on Davin knows how to save his life and they take him there.
• Wrecked Weapon: Ferrus Manus breaks Fulgrim's non-evil sword.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Isstvan III did not go anywhere near as swimmingly as Horus expected. Considering what happens on Isstvan V, he manages to roll with the setback quite well.
• A Year and a Day: This is exactly how long Barnabas Dantioch manages to defend Schadenhold.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time does not flow at the same pace in the Warp as it does in realspace. Argel Tal experienced six months in the Eye of Terror in The First Heretic while less than a minute passes outside. Horus enters the Warp for what seems to be a few seconds in Vengeful Spirit, but when he comes out he's been gone for so long that he has visibly aged.
• You Are in Command Now: Happens to many Astartes as their Primarchs are gone.
  • Garro takes charge of the remaining loyalist Death Guard when Mortarion goes traitor.
  • When a Warp Storm cuts him off from Terra, Alexis Polux is forced to assume command of the Retribution Fleet.
  • Artellus Numeon is forced by his fellow Salamanders to take the mantle of Legion Master after Vulkan is presumed dead.
  • Shadrak Meduson becomes the Iron Hands' Legion Master after Ferrus Manus is beheaded and most of the Iron Fathers are killed in an ambush.
• You Are Not Alone: How the War Hounds/World Eaters persuade Angron to lead them.
• You Can't Fight Fate:
  • Ultimately the revelation Magnus the Red comes to near the end of A Thousand Sons. All that has happened and will happen was preordained by the Architect of Fate, Tzeentch, every aspect of his life since he bargained with the Chaos God to save his Legion. The only thing he can do is try and be content with the part he has to play.
  • Zigzagged in Ruinstorm. Sanguinius and Curze, who both have foreseen their own deaths, disagree on the matter. Curze is a pure fatalist while Sanguinius believes that although events are set, their meaning can be altered. Sanguinius is offered the choice of changing his ultimate death but he discovers that the offer is merely a temptation set up to seduce him to Chaos.
  • Daemons of Tzeentch all agree on the inevitability of one's fate, mainly because they are tied to Tzeentch.
• You Have Failed Me: When Perturabo took command of the IV Legion, he found it wanting and ordered it decimated (i.e., one in every ten Astartes was beaten to death by the other nine).
• Youngest Child Wins: Alpharius occupies the bottom of the Primarch totem pole, but is implied to be pivotal to how the whole Heresy pans out. Too bad his decision to side with Horus ultimately achieved exactly what he was trying to prevent.
• You No Take Candle: Scars and Brotherhood of the Storm establishes that Khorchin (the language of Chogoris) and Imperial Gothic are incompatible. As a result, White Scars from Chogoris will speak in rather fractured Low Gothic. When speaking in Khorchin, they are eloquent.
• You Shall Not Pass!: The Battle of Beta-Garmon in a nutshell. The Beta-Garmon cluster is a vital hub of warp routes leading to Terra that Horus must conquer in order to secure his supply lines and rear areas. Knowing that, Rogal Dorn deploys a great army to slow down Horus' conquest of the system. He knows that the loyalist forces don't have a hope of actually stopping Horus, but he's anticipating that the forces here will slow him down enough to give time for Guilliman and the Lion to come back in time for the Siege of Terra.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Nurgle-plague zombies, no less!

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