Mortarion: The Pale King (Volume 15) (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs) [Hardcover] Annandale, David

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Plenty of the Legion’s big hitters get cameos and there is plenty of interest in amongst the unrelenting gore. He's exactly like you'd expect him to be before his first campaign with his newly baptized Death Guard. High levels of radiation, everything is poisoned, blown up and there are literally hills of bodies next to the spires on the planet with people crawling over them. Fresh from blowing the character studies of Vulkan and Guilliman, Annandale takes the chance to reflect.

He is unwilling to let those in bondage suffer any longer than is absolutely necessary and he has very little patience for anyone who is willing to view human suffering as a single piece in a larger puzzle.

As for things I liked, Mortarion's point of view was actually interesting once you manage to get past his LARP-ing as "death incarnate. H. Right after they merge the two factions of the Dusk Raiders and Death Guard, so we see how Mortarion thinks and acts as a leader and savior. It does not wallow in endless repetitions of combat yet nor does it strand in long high minded dialogues.

While the focus of this book was always going to be on Mortarion, the novel actually does a solid job for its pagecount of adding depth to those characters that do make a cameo. She asks to serve him and he gives her a name and its revealed it is the woman from the epilogue that needed those augmentations from the phosphex and radiation injuries and he thinks of her as a student and proof his methods are correct. The fifteenth instalment in The Horus Heresy Primarchs series, The Pale King tells of the atrocities committed by the Reaper in the name of justice—and the consequences of challenging his methods. The only weak point here is the monotony of the movement through the hive, which feels like it needs more connection, as the rest of the book is very strong with deep, interesting, characters within and without the death guard. A large section of the book could easily have been labelled as merely "Bolter-Porn" but through leveraging Mortarion's character arc, several interesting side characters and the evolving character of the nascent Death Guard, none of the constant butchery seems gratuitous at all.

Annandale devotes time to the enemies of his protagonist in an effort to show the overwhelming power of the space marines, but it also leads the reader to an understanding of just how evil the antagonists of the Death Guard really are. Such easy alterations, in my mind, prove there is a better book buried within the one that was published, but perhaps Mr. He wants to release the downtrodden and spare anyone who has been exposed to cruelty similar to the experiences of his childhood.