The Raven Guard are my favourite Legion. My liking for them dates all the way back to 2002, when I first read about the sons of Corax in a battered second-hand edition of White Dwarf. Something about these black-armoured underdogs who struck from the shadows resonated with me. I was consequently rather disappointed by Deliverance Lost.
Deliverance Lost is the first Heresy novel written by Gav Thorpe, best known for his 40K Dark Angels fiction. In Deliverance Lost he tackles the Raven Guard at their lowest ebb, the vast majority of their Legion destroyed in the Dropsite Massacre and the survivors divided into those who were there and those who came to rescue them. The novel starts slowly with the rescue fleet's agonisingly tense flight from the Isstvan system and then takes the Raven Guard to Terra, where Corax seeks an audience with the Emperor and the means to rebuild his Legion. Much as the action is shown from the perspective of Alpha Legion marines who have infiltrated the Raven Guard, and since they all call themselves 'Alpharius' you have to pay close attention to realise there is more than one infiltrator narrating events. The best part of the book comes when the Raven Guard are forced to navigate a complex labyrinth beneath one of Terra's mountains in order to retrieve the gene-tech that created the primarchs, a gift to Corax from the Emperor so that he can rebuild his Legion. The Raven Guard then return to Deliverance and begin using the tech to create new Space Marines even more enhanced than the old kind, a project that the Alpha Legion operatives are soon required to sabotage.
The second half of Deliverance Lost is rather lackluster, and part of the reason is Gav Thorpe's basic and at times boring writing. It was this flaw that made Deliverance Lost the first Horus Heresy book I didn't finish on my first attempt. Furthermore, the Corax Thorpe creates is rather different from the one I read about all those years ago in White Dwarf, single-mindedly pursuing the creation of new super-marines even after one of the infiltrators poisons the gene-tech with daemon blood, mutating the next generation of Raptors into hideous monsters. Guilt over this act is what is supposed to have forced Corax to flee into the Eye of Terror after the Heresy, but in Deliverance Lost he stands by the project until his commanders convince him otherwise. The mutated Raptors are inspiring characters, loyal despite being monsters and defending the Raven Guard gene-seed store from the infiltrators during the final battle, but the final battle itself is full of illogical sequences like the revelation that commander Agapito, a red-herring who is implied throughout the book to be one of the infiltrators, has actually just been hunting them down himself rather than simply telling Corax what he suspects. Another move that makes no sense is Omegon engineering the entire battle so that he can steal the gene-tech himself, the same gene-tech that he had poisoned and is now presumably useless.
Deliverance Lost is not a bad story, but it suffers from being ordinarily written and having a few plot holes. This muddies up the Raven Guard's debut into the Heresy, meaning that no matter how much I love the boys in black Deliverance Lost will never be my favourite Heresy novel.
Limited-edition novella review: Corax: Soulforge
Every now and then Black Library decide to raise revenue by releasing a Horus Heresy story as a limited-edition novella, printing a small number of copies and charging exorbitantly for each. These novellas are then given a mainstream release years later, finally making them available to the vast majority of fans. Corax: Soulforge by Gav Thorpe was the fourth of these novellas released, and follows the Raven Guard Legion as they seek to overthrow an alliance between Word Bearers and traitor Mechanicum on Constanix II.
Corax: Soulforge continues the story of the Raven Guard where Deliverance Lost leaves off, putting them on the offensive for the first time as they take the fight to the traitors across the stars. Corax: Soulforge recounts just one of their battles, an action on the backwater Forge-world of Constanix II where a Word Bearers warband fleeing from Calth have entered into an alliance with the ruling Magos and by combining their Warp-sorcery with Mechanicum technology are creating the first Defilers.
The action begins on a stricken Word Bearers vessel, where Agapito endangers the mission by hunting down Word Bearers instead of following orders and the brutalised Navigator agrees to help the Raven Guard for freeing her from her tormentors. She takes the ship to Constanix II, where Corax conveniently overhears a coven of tech-adepts providing exposition about their ruling Magos having sided with the traitors. Corax rallies their forces to his cause and takes over the city-barge Atlas, which he then uses to directly attack Constanix's capital Iapetus. The final battle sees Agapito manage to let go of his revenge and follow orders that help the Raven Guard win the day, whilst Corax kills the traitor Magos and the Word Bearers' leading sorcerer. The action is engaging and the outcome satisfying, but overall the final battle is rushed and bits are left out to fit the story into the novella page-count. Corax: Soulforge is a good novella, but I would recommend it only to Raven Guard fans or die-hard completionists.
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