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*** read no further if you don’t want spoilers ***

I haven’t read this book as I’m not paying 10.99 for 180 pages of something that we know won’t reveal much of anything. But I have read about the contents of the book and watched some videos so wanted to have a discussion about it.

If you aren’t aware this book reveals that the emperor and cypher are in cahoots or at least come to an agreement.

Hover and some fallen escape from prison on terra. They retrieve the lion sword (all of the fallen follow cypher wether they are chaos worshipers or not) as that seems to be a crucial token of cyphers office and they can’t leave terra without it. It’s has some special purpose. Basically everyone except cypher dies on the way to the throne room. Which is cyphers real target. However a dead custodes comes back to life has a vision of an old corpse on a chair in the middle of a desolated city and delivers the message to cypher (from the emperor) “not yet”. And cypher disappears.

What I can’t figure out is when in the recent events of 40K this happens. RG is alive so it’s after that but I presume it’s before the lion returns.

So the question is what does the emperor mean by not yet. I have 2 unoriginal theories, one is that the lion sword is needed to access the secret room on the rock that even the Dark Angles don’t know about and wake up the lion. And at this point in the time line it’s too soon.

Or the emperor has asked cypher to kill him but it was too soon for the emperor to achieve his rebirth in what ever manner that takes.

In the boom cypher is shown to perform alpharius level scheming. Possibly across time. and there is a suggestion that he cultivated minute events decades ago to facilitate some of the events in this book, such as the power in the prison complex failing due to a faulty component made on mars a long time ago.

It’s such grand scheming that you could think that cypher is alpharius. And if not why would cypher be the one expected to kill the emperor. I suppose he is a time travelling super genius assassin.

It could also be that the lion sword is one of the keys needed for vashtorr to bring back caliban/wyrmwood and that is what a lot of the fallen want. The chaotic ones and the rename ones. I expect that we will discover wyrmwood to be a hellforge planet run by a legion of falle

These stories are always really clever or just really dumb.

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
These stories are always really clever or just really dumb.

Spoiler:

I have read it and I enjoyed it. However I beleve it to be more mystery for the sake of mystery with no real answers. Countless times throughout the book Cypher address you the reader. Asking "did you expect that?" "are you paying attention?"

It then turns out the reader he is addressing is Mordekai the libby chasing him watching the book play out in the manner of how we are reading it. But then he goes onto to explain everything that happened might not have happened as it just merely the story he has told Mordekai to get it to where is needs to be, nothing might have played out how it was told to us, it just needed to be told that way.

This is the side where it can become dumb, because if everything is a mystery and nothing might be true then what is the point in the book?

I still enoyed it and I enjoyed it for what it is but I think it has the potential to be seen as dumb and for good reason.

But if you dont read too much into it and take it for what it is. The ramblings of a 10,000 year old crazy lore obsessed space marine with warp infested mind then its fun.

There’s too much of this mystery for mystery’s sake atm, the alpharius book was the same. It feels like GW lack confidence in commuting to cannon in case they need to retcon later

mrFickle wrote:

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
These stories are always really clever or just really dumb.

Spoiler:

I have read it and I enjoyed it. However I beleve it to be more mystery for the sake of mystery with no real answers. Countless times throughout the book Cypher address you the reader. Asking "did you expect that?" "are you paying attention?"

It then turns out the reader he is addressing is Mordekai the libby chasing him watching the book play out in the manner of how we are reading it. But then he goes onto to explain everything that happened might not have happened as it just merely the story he has told Mordekai to get it to where is needs to be, nothing might have played out how it was told to us, it just needed to be told that way.

This is the side where it can become dumb, because if everything is a mystery and nothing might be true then what is the point in the book?

I still enoyed it and I enjoyed it for what it is but I think it has the potential to be seen as dumb and for good reason.

But if you dont read too much into it and take it for what it is. The ramblings of a 10,000 year old crazy lore obsessed space marine with warp infested mind then its fun.

There’s too much of this mystery for mystery’s sake atm, the alpharius book was the same. It feels like GW lack confidence in commuting to cannon in case they need to retcon later

I'm inclined to agree. Ambiguity/mystery is fun, but when entire novels are so unverified that you walk away with functionally zero new canon lore, it feels a little unsatisfying.

The concept of an unreliable narrator is not exactly a new one. The point of the story is the ride of the story, not the truth of it. You can expect the story is true, but not the details. What lies did Cypher tell and to what end? That is the question you are supposed to be left with.

It sounds like a rather fun book with that setup. Makes me want to pick it up.

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:
It sounds like a rather fun book with that setup. Makes me want to pick it up.

It does sound like a rollercoaster of a book but it’s so expensive for 180 pages.

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:

This is the side where it can become dumb, because if everything is a mystery and nothing might be true then what is the point in the book?

That's basically BL's favourite trick by this point. They're obsessed with going "But did it really happened? Maybe it didn't? I guess we'll never know!" about basically any plot. If not in-book, then in the author's commentary.

Dark Angels were what got me into the space marines, so I was relatively excited for the book. I think for the most part I did like it, but by the end it just felt like too much of a waste of time, if that makes sense? I think there's only so much of hearing the narrator go "Is it a truth or is a lie, hoo hoo hoo".

I did find the Dark Angels doing their thing hilarious though (in a good way). The obsession to the point of crippling an important part of the Throne World and not caring because it's all about the obsession was a great way to show on a smaller scale than just a campaign in a timeline in a codex how far the Chapter really has fallen. I just think that by the end of the book I felt more underwhelmed than anything, especially because we had to wait so long to read or listen to it. I was sort of hoping we'd get Cypher and the Lion, so there was that disappointment there for me, but it wasn't enough to make me hate it or anything. I don't think it's a book I'll read again, probably, but it's not a horrible book by any means.

I think the biggest pro for me, besides the stuff with the loyalst DA was that we got to see more of Terra during the chaos and anarchy of the start of the Noctis Aeterna and all of that. I just wish we could have seen more! I think in the end BL's biggest issue is trying to keep with those very specific page counts, haha.

Yeah I don’t see what is wrong with establishing actual factual events to enhance the setting that people play in.

I think that they could have kept cyphers identity a mystery forever but they have brought him into the fold too much and teased too much that it becomes less fun and more frustrating not to know