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Quote by John French

“Now you see,’ said Yesugei. ‘We are made to be greater than the humanity we serve. The weight of the blade is nothing to us. To ride and fight and bleed for days is nothing to us. Nothing to us… We are made higher and so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child’s eyes knows – that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear – not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder… Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.”

Quote by John French

Book:Mortis
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Mortis

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John French

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“He had always wanted the world to be just like that – no doubts, no lingering areas of hesitation or equivocation, just action, purity of will and deed, the knowledge that whatever he did could never be, and could never have been, otherwise. From the first day of this rebellion, everything had shaken that single-mindedness. The things he had relied on with total surety had proven to be illusory and weak, and things he had thought of as being fictive and simple-minded had proved to have unexpected power. He had been forced to recalibrate, to reorientate. As every sword-brother knew, the time of greatest weakness was during the correction of a defective technique. He had started to fight… and lose. He had faced Horus Aximand and had been made to withdraw. He had faced Khârn, whom he had not yet been able to bring himself to hate fully, and been beaten. He had even taken on a primarch. Had that been hubris? Or just frustration, a desperate bid to recover his now-so-elusive sense of superiority? If he had somehow done the impossible and bested Fulgrim, would that have finally banished the whispers of doubt? Probably not. The fault had never been external, he knew now – it had always been within him, slowly metastasising, becoming impassable the longer he ignored it. He had needed to hear Dorn’s words of release to understand it. They had, all of them, been fighting with one hand behind their backs, trying to hold on to a dream that had already died. The enemy was utterly changed now. They were physically stronger and morally intoxicated, eagerly drinking up gifts that should have been shunned as poison. And yet, those who remained loyal had tried to cling on to what they had been at the very start. They had still mouthed pieties about Unity and the Imperial Truth long after fealty to such virtues had become impossible. Once he grasped that, once he faced up to it, he had what he needed to remove the fetters in his mind. I no longer fight for the Imperium that was, he told himself. I fight for the Imperium as it will become.”

The Black LibraryThe Horus HeresyThe Siege Of TerraBlack Templars
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“Mankind, in my experience,’ he said, ‘and I think we can at least accept I have more experience of it than most… Mankind has proven to be pathologically incapable of learning from its own mistakes. It blithely remembers the witness of history, but it does not apply the knowledge it gains. The Age of Strife was a terrible thing, inflicted by man upon man. Those few of us who lived through it, and survived it, no matter what part we played, no matter what crimes we committed, we all looked on it during the last years of its horror and said never again. Never again can we do this to ourselves. Yet, mere centuries later, Terra is about to fall, Terra and the galaxy with it, at the hands of engineered humans turning against their creator. This siege, your war, it is self-inflicted.”

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“And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.”

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“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.’ She smiled. ‘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.”

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“He soon laid eyes on the enemy again – warriors of Lorgar’s Legion, advancing through the unnatural dusk with raw confidence, surrounded by the spectral flicker of half-instantiated daemonkind. Their armour was carved with words of power, decorated with the bones and the flesh of those they had slain, their helms deformed into outstretched maws, or serpent’s mouths, or the leer of some Neverborn warp prince. Their cantrips stank and pulsed around them, making the natural air recoil and mist shred itself into appalled ribbons. They were engorged with their veil-drawn power, sick on it, their blades running with new-cut fat and their belts hung with severed scalps. For all that, they were still warriors, and they detected Valdor’s presence soon enough. Nine curved blades flickered into guard, nine genhanced bodies made ready to take him down. He raced straight into the heart of them, lashing out with his spear, slicing clean through corrupted ceramite. The combined blades danced, snickering in and out of one another’s path as if in some rehearsed ritual of dance-murder, all with the dull gold of the lone Custodian at its centre. A poisoned gladius nearly caught his neck. A fanged axe-edge nearly plunged into his chest. Long talons nearly pulled him down, ripe to be trodden into the mire under the choreo graphed stamp of bronze-chased boots. But not quite. They were always just a semi-second too slow, a fraction too predictable. The gap between the fighters was small, but it remained unbridgeable. His spear slammed and cut, parried and blocked, an eye-blink ahead of the lesser blades, a sliver firmer and more lethal in its trajectory, until black blood was thrown up around it in thick flurries and the lens-fire in the Word Bearers’ helms died out, one by one. Afterwards, Valdor withdrew, breathing heavily, taking a moment to absorb the visions he had been gifted with each kill. Lorgar’s scions were little different to the true daemons in what they gave him – brief visions of eternal torment, wrapped up in archaic religious ciphers and a kind of perpetually forced ecstasy. They were steeped in some of the purest, deepest strands of Chaos, wilfully dredging up the essence of its mutating, despoiling genius and turning it, through elaborate tortures, into a way of war. To fight them was to be reminded, more acutely than with most others, of the consequences of defeat.”

ChaosThe Black LibraryThe Horus HeresyThe Siege Of Terra
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“The horde had the numbers to bring about the war’s end, while the defenders only possessed the numbers to delay it – but the losses were going to be grotesque. Ulienne didn’t want to die for the Emperor’s stubbornness. She wanted to live, to see the Warmaster’s ambitions come to fruition. She wanted the Imperium that Horus had promised. An empire for eternity. A kingdom of humanity that would never fall.”

MilitaryThe Black LibraryWarhammer 40kThe Horus HeresyThe Siege Of Terra
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“There it was again, the treasonous little notion Ulienne couldn’t quite shake. Horus was a hero, the Warmaster of the Imperium, the pacifier of the galaxy. Of course she’d followed him. The Legio Audax had willingly worn his colours and cast their fate with his. But what would be left after this war? What would be left of Terra and the armies fighting to take it? Surely even now, quiescent alien kingdoms at the Imperium’s edges were reawakening, daring to cast jealous eyes at the worlds they’d lost in the Great Crusade. Would there be enough of the Warmaster’s hosts left to hold the Imperium in its entirety? And what would those hosts look like, with all order and discipline and humanity raked out of them? The Legiones Astartes were already blood-maddened and fighting by the side of those… those things. The regiments of Imperial Army wearing the Warmaster’s Eye were no better. Ulienne Grune didn’t want peace. Peace was boring. Peace was for the weak. She wanted wars she could win.”

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