Nightmare Fuel / Horus Heresy

Nurgle loves you.

"The Neverborn are coming...
The Neverborn are coming...
The Neverborn are coming for you all..."

Daemons to the Ultramarines, Calth That Was

The Horus Heresy began when Horus Lupercal turned from his Father's light and embraced Chaos. Each novel in the series has plenty of horrors to be unleashed (or has been unleashed), and it only gets worse book by book.WARNING: Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages. All spoilers will be unmarked!

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• The Last Church gives us a harrowing insight into what it's like for ordinary human beings to fight against the Emperor's Thunder Warriors. Uriah, who was lucky to survive the battle with even his sanity intact, recounts the ridiculous economy of force that they used to tear apart a rebel army, painting a harrowing picture of torn limbs, voided bowels and opened guts. The bolters and chainswords that are so standard to the 40k universe are described as the absolutely horrific weapons they truly are.
  • Even worse, Uriah came home to find that raiders had ransacked his ancestral home and fatally tortured his father and sisters in a vain attempt to give up their family treasures.
• The virus bombing of Isstvan III. We get a really detailed description of just how the Life-Eater virus works, and it's horrifying: flesh begins sloughing off within seconds, nervous systems collapse, and bones dissolve into jelly. The virus moves so fast it practically travels at the speed of thought. Galaxy in Flames describes entire cultures and nations across the planet melting to death without any warning and without a single clue as to why. Here one moment and then a landscape of flammable sludge the next.
• The Warsinger's Temple on Isstvan III is described as a disturbingly organic-looking structure that, even after the complete eradication of the planet's biosphere, exudes a disturbing vibe that makes even the Astartes legions hesitate to enter. Considering the psychic song-attacks that the Warsingers assault their opponents with, one can't help but think that the Isstvanians had a few deals with a certain She-Who-Thirsts.
• Every single time daemonic possession comes up. Effects range from simple transformation into a bloated corpse to the host's body turning inside out.
  • The first occurrence in Horus Rising bears special mention, partly because of Samus-possessed Jubal's brutal slaughter of his former brothers-in-arms, and partly because of the moment when he gets back up, just as Sindermann has just come up with a rational explanation for his possession. One of his comrades is so utterly terrified that he promptly voids himself and then slips on his own terror-waste while trying to run away.
  With a creak of dried sinew, Jubal raised his head and stared up at Sindermann with blood-red eyes.
  "Look out," he wheezed.
  • Solun Decius' possession by the Lord of Flies and subsequent rampage through the medical ward he was in from The Flight of the Eisenstein. The description of the carnage he leaves is downright horrifying, from the hallways coated in blood and bone fragments, to the almost unrecognizable remains of Astartes consumed by flies, to the hospital patients infected with horrible diseases and left to die agonizing deaths on their gurneys.
• Everything about the Slaaneshi corruption of the Emperor's Children in Fulgrim. Fabius Bile enhances them physically and driven by the insanity of the Laer Temple, their ship becomes host to a ton of nightmarishly debauched art, with Fulgrim's own chamber becoming host to what one narrator describes as 'beyond pornographic' artwork. This isn't even going into the Maraviglia, a debased concert which also happens to basically be a Slaaneshi ritual, resulting in such delights as audience members gleefully beating others to death then turning back to the music completely unconcerned, the dancers killing themselves in performing completely inhuman movements, the singers doing the same while capturing notes human throats aren't meant to sing, the summoning of a group of Daemonettes who kill a good chunk of the audience who are too enraptured to care, and finally the rampage of the first Noise Marines, who turn the concert's special instruments into weapons which tear their victims apart with waves of sound. By the time of Isstvan V, the Legion has degenerated from proud but noble warriors into a horde of twisted hedonists, and everything about their fall is nightmarish.
  • Serena d'Angelus is perhaps the worst part. Originally introduced as a fairly kind and gentle painter, she is so twisted by Slaaneshi corruption and her pre-existing low self-esteem that she seduces a fellow remembrancer for the sole purpose of luring him back to her room so she can kill him and use his blood and body as materials for her paintings. And she does this multiple times.
  • In Angel Exterminatus, a subplot follows the torment two Imperial Fists suffers in the hands of Apothecary Fabius, who is interested with them for their particular genomes. Having strapped the two legionaries to an operating table, Fabius constantly injects one with all kinds of diseases to see the limits of an Imperial Fist's immune system while he grafts all kinds of xeno appendage and vat-grown limbs to the other since he's lost all his limbs. The months of torture nearly break them and only their memory of loyal servant of the Imperium helps them cope with the trauma. But then Fabius turns them into "terata", supposedly augmented Space Marines with overgrown muscles, claws and a bestial mind. The Imperial Fists slowly break, eating the hormone-rich food that is given to them in the hopes of having an occasion to kill Fabius but then they are sicced onto Iron Hands and their mind truly break when they kill a loyalist Space Marine and realize the horror of what they've done.
  • The Emperor's Children get, if anything, worse by the time of The Damnation of Pythos. Iron Hands troops boarding one of their ships find, among other things, a meticulously crafted carpet made of human tissues and a door with human bodies embedded in it, apparently still alive when they were immersed in the molten metal.
• Vulkan's torture at Night Haunter's hands. He's forced to kill his sons, fight his own loyalist brother, watch people around him die, has his hopes raised only for Curze to crush them and all the while, visions of Ferrus, blaming him for his death, plague him. Worse, he can't escape this by dying, because he can't die, and when he finally manages to escape, he's insane to the point that nothing but desire for Curze's death remains of a man who was once the one White Sheep of the Primarchs.
• Even before the rise of the Imperial Cult, the Imperial Army was fanatical in their service to the Emperor. In Horus Rising, shortly after the conquest of Sixty-Three-Nineteen, Remembrancer Karkasy gets drunk in one of the few intact parts of the city while looking for poetic inspiration, when he has a realization that the Imperium of Man, like all worldly things, is impermanent and will fall one day. He declares this to a bunch of celebrating Imperial Army veterans and is nearly beaten to death as a result.
• The savagery of the Word Bearers as they settle the score with the Ultramarines at Calth is quite something. While the XVII Legion were apparently notorious for excessive violence during the Great Crusade, it pales in comparison to what they do in the name of getting even with those they hold responsible for their humiliation. Consider the below example, taken from the audio drama Garro: Oath of Moment as an example of the depths of brutality the Word Bearers sink to in the name of revenge:
  "He saw a group of Word Bearers kill an Ultramarine with a hurricane of storm bolters. To his disgust, even when the Astartes fell dead to the ground, they continued to fire into his body, unloading round after round into the twitching mess of the corpse...and as they did so, he heard them laughing".
• The line below from the same so succinctly sums up the fall of the Word Bearers (and the last part could be interpreted as referring to all the Traitor Legions) to Chaos that it is spine-chilling:
  "The Master of Mankind had personally rebuked the Primarch Lorgar, chastising him for fostering idolatry of his father and violence beyond the pale. Some believed Lorgar and his legion had heeded these lessons, but now it seemed clear that, if anything, they had rejected their lord and found a new path, one of cruelty and carnage, fuelled by raw hate and new gods".
• The description of the bio-weapons used by the Death Guard as they attack the White Scars at Catullus with the full intention of exterminating the Vth Legion to stop them interfering in Horus's plans any further are horrific. Even more worrying is the possibility that given Mortarion's increasing dabbling with the Warp since Scars, these bombs could be less man-made weapons and more something crafted with the assistance of Nurgle.
  "Hundreds of the bombs exploded, flooding the frigate's lower decks with boiling green fogs that churned and hissed their way through solid adamantium. The crew, even those in protective armour, were eaten alive, their atmosphere filters blown and their eye-masks fizzing.
• Another one from The Path of Heaven: Mortarion personally interrogates the captain of a White Scars warship, demanding information on Jaghatai Khan's location. When the loyalist refuses to talk, Mortarion gives him a choice between giving the Death Lord what he wants and getting a Mercy Kill in exchange, or be Defiant to the End and suffer a Mind Rape from a horrific invertebrate creature whose venom will ultimately kill him, after hours of agony as the venom destroys his brain, but not before making the White Scar extremely suggestible to questioning. The sheer relish of Mortarion's description of the venom's effects is spine-chilling.
• The description of the Keeper of Secrets Manushya-Rakshasi and its daemonette minions possessing the crew of the Emperor's Children warship Ravisher to manifest in the material universe is horrific. The Space Marines becoming daemonhosts split open and come apart as the daemons tear their way into existence through their host bodies.
  "His outer battle-plate exploded outwards, revealing a new, sinuous underbody of violet flesh and black veins. His stature swelled to obscene portions until he towered over them. Arms, four of them, corded and bound with leather, unravelled in place of his own, and horns erupted, twisting, from the bones of his dissolving face. He took a first step, and instead of a heavy-tread boot, a cloven hoof cracked the deck".
  • Even more unsettling, as the transformation begins, the Ravisher's bridge crew go for weapons and try to put the possessed Astartes down. Against Slaaneshi daemons, this is the worst thing they could have done, as the pain of being hit and shot does nothing but accelerate the transformations.
• The near-fatal beating that Karkasy receives in Horus Rising, all for daring to speak out against the Imperium. It gets worse when you realize that this same determination to speak the truth, however unpleasant it might seem, is what pushes post-Face–Heel Turn Horus to have him killed in False Gods.
• In The Unremembered Empire, Konrad Curze infiltrates and begins a killing spree in the Fortress of Hera, slaughtering everyone unfortunate enough to cross his path and using the dark and the chaos he causes to his advantage. Highlights include rigging the bodies of dead legionaries with Guilliman hearing some of his Ultramarines getting killed by a grenade over vox and Curze spooking a squad so much they accidentally fire on each other. The massacre climaxes with the Night Haunter toying with Tarasha Euten in Guilliman's bedroom: within the space of a few seconds, Curze enters the chamber unnoticed, writes Guilliman's name on the walls with fresh blood, fills Euten's cup with some of said blood, and hides the decapitated corpse of the man from whom he obtained the blood beneath the bed, just so he can terrorize an unarmed old woman. And he does all this despite Euten being at the heart of Ultramar's fortress in a well-lit open room.
• The Burning of Prospero: After the Council of Nikaea, Magnus received a vision that his brother Horus would rebel and start a galactic civil war. After trying and failing to save Horus from falling to Chaos, he decided to ignore the Council's decision to outlaw the use of psychic powers by Astartes and attempted to warn the Emperor. In process, he accidentally destroyed part his father's Webway conduit and allowed warp forces to flood into the Imperial Palace. Magnus fled back to his homeworld of Prospero in shame and out of fear of his father's response. The Emperor sent Leman Russ and the Space Wolves to bring him back to Terra, but Horus intercepted his orders and convinced Russ that bringing Magnus back would be "a waste of time and effort" and it would be better to annihilate him and his legion right then. What followed was the total obliteration of the planet, as the space fleet bombarded Prospero with laser batteries, melta torpedos, and mass-drivers. Cities burned, seas boiled, mountain ranges crumbled, superheated winds scoured the planet, and the surface was rendered molten down to the bedrock. This initial bombardment was so fast and powerful that only one city, Tizca, survived thanks to a telekinetic shield formed by the Thousand Sons legions stationed there. All because Magnus tried to save his brother.
  • Arguably even made worse because despite the orders Russ received from Horus, he didn't want to execute Magnus. Russ hoped to receive a message of surrender from Magnus. And judging by tone of 'Thousand Sons' Magnus would have done so gladly had he known it was an option. But mistrust, misunderstanding, trickery and shame prevented both of them from resolving things peacefully. All the horrors of the Burning made possible by two brothers not knowing that had either of them tried harder to talk, the other would have gladly listened.
• The flesh-change is among the most nightmarish fate suffered by Space Marines. Without them knowing why and how to stop it, the Thousand Sons can spontaneously mutate when they use their psychic powers and the mutation can also spread to nearby legionaries. One psyker whose power can slow the mutation gets to see eyes grow on both of his hands.

• Angron: Slave of Nuceria goes into the details of just how monstrous and sadistic the "games" were in Desh'ea. They weren't just forced to fight each other; the slavers got creative with their cruelty.
  • The "Devil's Tears" involves a group of slaves dumped in a chamber that rapidly fills with water, except it's not just water– it's a potent acid, deliberately diluted so that it dissolves its victims as slowly as possible. They can escape by climbing up a metal scaffolding, but it's a pyramid that gets narrower and narrower, and the acid never stops rising. At first, the slaves try to help each other up, but space inevitably runs out and forces them to either fall in, or push others in to save themselves. It's clear that none of them want to kill each other, but the fate of the acid is so horrible that they just revert to animalistic survival instinct.
    • From what we see later on, when Angron is forced to fight and kill Oenomaus, the man who was the closest thing he had to a father figure, it's clear the slavers will exploit bonds between their slaves just for extra sadism. Imagine being forced to condemn friends and family to a horrible death out of sheer desperation; or worse, having someone you love and trust shove you off the pyramid to give themselves a few more seconds of life. And if you refuse, you either die yourself, or have the Butcher's Nails hammered into you, after which you kill them anyway and only become aware of it after the fact.
  • Later, Angron and another slave he's befriended are drugged unconscious and wake up in a disgusting, slimy darkness. Turns out that while they were knocked out, they were force-fed whole to a giant worm, and have to escape its innards before they either suffocate or get digested. And all their weapons are confiscated beforehand, so the only escape is to claw their way out with their bare hands. Angron's Primarch Super-Strength means they're able to break free, but the other slave– explicitly just a boy– suffers all the Body Horror of being partially digested and dies, with the spectators mocking Angron's desperate attempts to resuscitate him. Suffice it to say, Humans Are Bastards is on full display in Desh'ea.
  • Take the above into consideration, then consider that the Emperor was willing to accept these monsters into his fledgling Imperium, so long as they peacefully capitulated to his rule and let him take Angron back. With his vast army, including the entirety of the World Eaters Legion, he could have toppled the tyrants from the throne, supporting Angron's rebellion and earning his loyalty in the process. He chose not to, because it was more expedient. That is the kind of man the Emperor was.

• The fate of the psykers sacrificed to the Emperor, as shown through the terrified eyes of a young teenaged girl named Skoia - a low-level psyker who can hear the dead. She's ruthlessly hunted down by the Sisters of Silence as her parents pleaded for her to run, dragged off to the Black Ships while desperately pleading that she did nothing wrong, then strapped into one of the coffin-pods powering the Golden Throne, upon which the reader is given a lovely description of Skoia feeling her body slowly shutting down and her heartbeat slowing to nothing as she desperately (and ineffectually) screams for someone to help her via her psychic abilities. Oh, and just in case all that wasn't nasty enough - she can hear all of the other psykers screaming as well.
• "Misbegotten", by Dan Abnett:
  • For backstory, Misbegotten revolves around a pre-Heresy Horus and his Luna Wolves discovering the Death World stronghold of Velich Tarn, which has been the hideout of the exile Basilio Fo for the last five millennia since he fled during humanity's great stellar exodus in the Age of Technology. Basilio Fo called himself a "Worker of Obscenity", and was somewhere between an Evilutionary Biologist and a Mad Artist whose genre was Bio Punk. When the Luna Wolves discover him, he's the only human left on a planet crawling with nightmarish bio-engineered cyborgs created from clones of 400 different individuals, which have been combined and recombined in countless grotesque ways. The Luna Wolves call Fo's creations "cyberzerkers", "biomecannibals", and "misbegot", but none of these names really do justice to the sheer horror of what they face.
  Steel teeth, like human incisors, arranged in a grinding circle like the head of a mining rock-drill. A snout of cream bone armor. Massive jaw-muscles exteriorised, reinforced with hydraulic baffles, sheathed in the folds of a throat that bellied like a serpent.
  A pallid thing like a starfish, the limbs human arms, a beaked mouth at the center. A thorned snake as thick as a tree trunk, formed from translucent intestine. Something made entirely of weeping eyes. Here, four thick human legs bearing a sack that opened in a gaping orifice that was a mouth within a mouth within a mouth. Glistening things covered in blisters and horns. Pulsing things festooned with barbs. Things made of interlocked hands that cupped drooling mouths and glaring pupils. Things sheathed in fingernail horn, their exposed flanks stippled with coarse black hairs and open sores.
  • Then comes the showdown where Horus must defeat Basilio Fo's ultimate monstrosity in order to capture the Mad Scientist. The creature is a nightmarish impossibility, a mass of flesh and limbs and maws as big as three starships put together. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that, as much as its anatomy defies sanity or even recognition, each individual portion of its awfulness is clearly recognizable as a piece of human anatomy.
  • Finally, with the misbegotten slain, Horus captures Basilio Fo, who simply waits calmly as the Luna Wolves declare him their prisoner. When they demand to know why he refused their offer to be welcomed into the Imperium, he explains that he wasn't exiled those five millennia ago. He fled the rise of the man who would become the Emperor, and he calmly denounces the Emperor and his creations as a far worse evil than anything he had ever or could ever achieve, before asking them to hurry up and execute him, as he'd rather be dead than share a universe with the likes of them.
  • For all the terrors seen in the story, perhaps the worst is the final paragraph, which notes that, as the insane Basilio Fo, transferred to Terra and left to rot in its dungeons by Horus' Cruel Mercy, hears the Heresy reach its final apocalyptic climax with Horus and the Emperor having their fateful duel, his madness is pierced by a single thought: the recognition that he was right all along. It's a thought makes him start to laugh. And laugh. And laugh...
• Abaddon's Villainous Breakdown in Saturnine is chilling and especially haunting in the audiobook format where the narration perfectly conveys a man coming apart at the seams. Throughout the Siege of Terra Abaddon has consistently been written as being A Lighter Shade of Black among Horus's forces: He's disgusted by Chaos, hates Zardu Layak's turning his brothers into slaves, displays a willingness to risk his life to rescue his allies, has the guts to call Horus out on his Orcus on His Throne antics and respects his soldiers. Then he gets lured into a death trap and watches his handpicked elite getting cut down one after another, accompanied by the realization that he is going to die and nothing he does can stop it with his hard earned reputation forever soiled. Something just *snaps* in Abaddon as he descends into by turns screaming rage and euphoric glee at the combat he's drowning in. The Noble Demon of the Siege of Terra is gone and in his place is the man who will go on to become one of the Biggest Big Bad 's of the Warhammer 40k setting.
  • Particularly disturbing is about Abaddon's implosion is that pointedly isn't falling under the sway of Chaos, indeed he mentally sneers at the 'fools' who worship Chaos such as Horus, rather he reaches a kind of dark insight (almost breaking the fourth wall) and comes to believe that the only thing that really matters in the Warhammer universe is War. "There is Only War" is the tagline of the setting and in this instance Abaddon perceives that and embraces it.
• Mortis gives readers Hatay-Antakya Hive, an apparent paradise/safe haven on Terra that is drawing refugees to it from across the war ravaged planet. It turns out far from a place of safety the Hive is a mega city sized farm run by the Emperor's Children where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are trapped in And I Must Scream states by Daemons. The trapped people are regularly "harvested" with the physical essence of their secrets and dreams being extracted by Daemons via Nausea Fuel described Mind Rape as their bodies are held immobile by thorn covered warp plantlife. Emperor's Children Space Marines are shown consuming the results of the harvests as one one would wine or drugs while fields of suffering mortals are reduced to something lower than cattle being tended - tortured by Daemons. John Grammaticus for once dead serious describes Hatay-Antakya Hive as Fulgrim's personal Garden of Delights and a microcosms of what the Daemon Primarch wants to see happen to all humanity.
  • The sheer horror of Hatay-Antakya is sold by both Oll Persson and John Grammticus both quasi immortals who have lived for many lifetimes and seen war on awful scale and Chaos run rampant before this being utterly terrified and sickened by the place to a degree readers who have followed them across the HH series have never seen before. Oll who has been around since the earliest days of humanity and seen all manner of atrocity and horror in his long life openly describes the Hive as amongst the absolute worst things he has ever witnessed.
• Sigismund being unleashed by Rogal Dorn during the Siege of Terra. Before dying at his hands, a few World Eaters share a lucid moment where they realize that Sigismund and his Templar Brethren have completely and utterly accepted their situation and happily become a group of stone-cold, relentless fanatics. Whatever few strands of hope that might have been had died at the Siege and humanity embraced fear and hatred utterly.
  • In particular, Kharn duels Sigismund and is utterly horrified by what his old friend has become: a pitiless, remorseless ghost, every bit the incarnation of what the Imperium will become in ten thousand years time. The fight itself gives Kharn a vision of that future: thousands of such warriors marching from utterly bleak fortresses, fighting endlessly not from any feeling but because in their fanaticism they've totally forgotten how to cede ground at all. Kharn's last words before he's cut down by the sheer, perfect nihilism Sigismund chose to embody as the Emperor's Champion complete the crushing sense that this is where the 40k Imperium is truly born: "Not... as... damaged... as... you..."
  • Looking on at this duel, Euphrati Keeler spurs refugees to sell their lives attacking the traitor forces with just power tools, delivering a chilling speech to Loken that brutally foreshadows the future to come:
    Keeler: I’m not going back. They need me. There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire. You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.
• Echoes of Eternity gives us a look inside what's left of Angron's mind now that he's a daemon prince and has fallen 100% under the sway of Khorne. The narration brings up cases of people who are in so much chronic pain they have no room for conscious thought and can only scream. It then says that Angron's state is comparable, only replacing pain with rage. The thing that Angron has become can't speak or even think because he doesn't even remember that words exist. He doesn’t remember his name or his history and has no recognition of anything that exists other than as a new source of blood and skulls. If anything of Angron the person was left, he would kill himself rather than exist in such a hideous state, but as a daemon prince, he is effectively immortal and his slavery to the Blood God will never end.
• Sanguinius dying at the hands of Horus. He walked into it knowing he was doomed, he performed perfectly up to the point of effectively moving at the speed of light and was a hair away from killing Horus in pure peer to peer combat while having been exhausted over months of non stop combat, mortally wounded, infected with curses from Nurgle and having already beaten Ka'bandha and Angron. All of that and he still completely overwhelmed Horus. It still wasn't enough. Horus delivers the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to end all of them and while Sanguinius still manages to fight back for a few moments through an act of supreme willpower, it doesn't matter. Horus beats with Worldbreaker over and over and over again, picks him with the Talon and crushes his spine and neck with Sanguinius literally being unable to speak his final words due to choking on his own blood filling his lungs. In amidst the eldritch horror, this display is a savage showing of mundane violence and manages to be the most realistically brutal thing in amidst the storm of things supposedly above mortal comprehension.
  • The Black Rage induced rampage of the Blood Angels when Sanguinius dies. Special mention must be made of Nassir Amit, who when he comes out it, remembers nothing of what occured. He just knows there is a trail of bodies behind him. And when he asks where the bodies came from and why they stop here he gets told "because this is how far you got before you stopped."
• The idea of the Emperor becoming a fifth Chaos God, the Dark King, which would end in humanity's destruction/damnation at best and destruction of the universe at worst.The Chaos Gods first planned it to be Horus, but decided to trick their ancient enemy into that, which nearly worked. What's worse that the ascension was only delayed, not prevented.