The end is nigh, and death comes to us all. The great saga that began 17 years ago with Dan Abnett’s seminal novel Horus Rising is hurtling to its inevitable conclusion. Written by the same author who launched this epic series, The End and the Death Volume 1 was unleashed on the galaxy earlier this year, while Volume 2 will be with us very shortly. But we’re not quite done… The story will conclude in Volume 3 of Dan’s magnum opus!
“This is the epic culmination of an enormous amount of work,” exclaims Abnett. “It is (I hope!) everything that everybody wants to see, in order to do justice to this momentous point in the lore.”
There’s one point that he’s especially eager to stress: this isn’t the third book in a trilogy. It’s the third part of a single novel that was simply too huge to publish.
“It had to be published in sections simply because we simply mechanically can’t print books that big! So I'd like to think that with Volumes 2 and 3 readers will see the architecture of a whole novel that's simply built on a much bigger scale than they are used to. A lot of threads from Volume 1 do arc over into Volume 3. It’s very much paying off things that happened before.”
“It took me two years to write the whole thing. It was literally the biggest thing I've ever done, the most formidable challenge, because there's so much expectation attached to it”, he adds. “I loved it. I was almost sorry when it was over and there was nothing left to write – but I had to have a good long lie-down afterwards…”
So what is it about? “It's the final hours of the Siege, the confrontation between the Emperor and Horus, which is immense. And it's also obviously the fallout of all the other major events that are going on at the time. It's the end of the Heresy era and the beginning is something new. There is a sense of history, pivoting in the most dramatic sense, and a lot of very important loose ends come together.”
But while many of your questions will be answered, many more will be posed: “This is a snapshot of what really happened, where the myth grew from. What the myth becomes is probably more important to Warhammer as that's what people have come to believe, 10,000 years later. But this is a moment of being there at ground zero and seeing these things as they actually play out from numerous perspectives… it almost tells you too many versions!”
Volume 2, meanwhile, will soon be hitting bookshelves. What’s all that about?
“The centrepiece of part two is Sanguinius vs Horus. And that is very different in every respect to the centrepiece of part three, which is Horus vs the Emperor. There was a very deliberate attempt on my part to make sure those things didn't just become just more of the same.”
“I was looking forward to returning to characters like Loken – who obviously has got to be in it because he was there at the start – and Jon Grammaticus. But as is ever the case, when you’re writing a character, you bond with them in a weird way and they become a favourite. So I loved writing Malcador and other characters who I've never really had the same level of time to spend with.
“Dorn and Valdor in particular were vastly enjoyable. Sanguinius is not a character I'd written much of, but I had fun with him. He’s an extremely difficult character to write, and a challenge that I really enjoyed. And weirdly, I found an enormous sympathy with Abaddon and the situation he finds himself in – where he's obviously completely committed to doing terrible things.
“He's on his way to becoming something even more dreadful yet, but he almost alone among the Traitor forces is aware of what they’re sacrificing and he hates it! He wants to be the warrior that he knows, and to win by military means – but things are slowly slipping away.”
And while he’s now finished with the Horus Heresy, Dan’s far from finished with Warhammer. He’s working on another novel set at a more contemporary period in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, one with a very different scope – but we wouldn’t be Warhammer Community if we told you what that was just yet! For now, he just hopes that people enjoy the end of the saga.
“I want this to be an appropriate end to a long-running and successful series, and I'm dying for people to get out there and read the whole thing as one piece, and go ‘Now I get why that mattered in book one!’”.
The End and the Death Volume 2 will be available soon in hardback, and we’ll have more info on Volume 3 on Warhammer Community as soon as we get it!