Deliverance Lost: Ghosts of Terra (The Horus Heresy)

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Firstly as a neccessary sequel to a massive world shattering event like The Dropsite Massacre there is a dearth of action and impetus from the start.

It is fitting for the Lord of Ravens in my eyes, and never done to the extent that it would reach into the comical. Nothing here is as melodramatic as the simple farewell Corax left to his sons, as per the old background material. Marcus Valerius, now promoted and in charge of a new cohort of Therion soldiers after his last group was sacrificed as a diversion to escape Isstvan, takes the brunt of the Emperor's Children resistance until the Raven Guard launch their planned attack and take control of the fortress. They are joined by Alpha Legionnaires in Raven Guard armour who snuck in during the fight and steal all the gene-tech despite the mutated Raptors being freed from containment by a dying Vincente Sixx and attacking the false Raven Guard.

The interactions between the dual Alpha Legion primarchs and their confederates/erstwhile bosses are fun. The story begins approximately 3 months after the Drop Site Massacre, with the unexpected rescue of Corax and the remnants of his Legion (at less than 5% strength) from Istvaan V.

Fear of slipping up, doubts over the mission, how to manipulate events to his advantage (and even his fate), are all worthwhile reading. Deliverance Lost is not just for fans of the Raven Guard - Corax's attempt to reconstitute his Legion with the aid of the Emperor is probably required reading for anyone watching the Horus heresy evolve. Still, I cannot help but feel that this final part was an afterthought, thrown in to show Corax and co in action, as the majority of the novel didn't have much bolter activity to show.Some people still go on and on about Corax being "emo" and like an edgy teenager, but that's not at all how he is. As the Horns Heresy divides the Imperium, Corax and his few remaining Raven Guard escape the massacre at Isstvan V.

One might argue that surely most of the Heresy books should suffer from this but somehow for me this is the only one where it has been a problem. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The Raptors are tested in battle in an assault on a Word Bearers station on Cruciax and prove effective if somewhat over-eager. Corus, nicknamed "Corax" which means "saviour", was found on a prison planet where he was adopted by the prisoners and raised not in hatred and fear, but in understanding that his people are being oppressed and he is the only man who can actually do something about it.I also want to praise it for the way Gav Thorpe managed to plant the seeds of suspicion within the reader. It's a well traveled tale, starting in Istvaan, moving to Terra and finally to the Raven Guard's world of Deliverance.

Even Corax in his darker moods and single-minded vision to re-build was not quite what I expected, and I ended up wondering if there should have been another narrator to the story here (probably Omegon? In the wake of the Dropsite Massacre Corax and the Raven Guard withdraw to lick their wounds and sharpen their claws. Fortunately there are no whining, attention-grabbing remembrancers here, they're all dead, along with SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND Raven Guard. And finally there's a lot of conjecture, hints and some small revelations about how the Raven Guard (and their enemy legion) survived until the 41st millenium.How about recovering from the loss of seventy-five thousand of your sons and be left with only five thousand? Piling up erratic behavior through the Alpha Legionaries and certain characters and ramping up the tension of the infiltration, he provided a magnificent red herring for readers to follow. I was also underwhelmed by both of the Dark Angels books in the Heresy series, and for some reason I was expecting this to be very similar, although I'm not sure why. Alpharius and Omegon are unfortunately pale shadows of the sinister and frightening creatures from Dan Abnett's "Legion", Alpharius in particular coming across as weak and rather pathetic, not the master of galactic destiny he actually is. On one hand I’ve often found myself rolling my eyes at just how “stupid” the Pimarch and a lot of the space marine commanders seem to be, and that’s not an issue in this book as I mentioned earlier.