Descent of Angels

Descent of Angels by Mitchell Scanlon is the sixth installment in the Horus Heresy series. Published while the series was still finding its feet, it departed from the series' barely-established style by going back hundreds of years to the beginning of the Great Crusade to show us the formation of the Dark Angels Legion. Indeed, despite being a Horus Heresy novel Descent of Angels doesn't touch on the heresy at all. It is relevant to the overall series only because it shows us the beginning of the divide that will one day tear the Dark Angels Legion in two and make them the hooded, brooding figures of vengeance we know from 40K.

The main protagonist of the novel is Zahariel, a youth from the planet Caliban where knightly orders defend the people from the predations of Great Beasts. Zahariel joins The Order, Caliban's foremost knightly organisation, and trains as a knight-aspirant along with his cousin Nemiel. If this is sounding less like military science-fiction and more like high fantasy it only goes to show how different this novel is from the rest of the series. Life on pre-Imperial Caliban seems to have been lifted directly from the pages of 80s genre fiction and the only hint of this story's place in the world of 30K is the presence of Lion El'Jonson, the Order's superhuman commander who along with his second-in-command Luther coordinates a planet-wide campaign to exterminate the Great Beasts and free Caliban from their threat.

When a Great Beast takes the life of Zahariel's mentor Amadis our hero vows revenge and hunts the creature down, unlocking in the life-or-death struggle his latent psyker powers. These make him a person of interest when, two-thirds of the way through the book, the Imperium arrives on Caliban and the First Legion Astartes discover Jonson their gene-father. Caliban rapidly modernises and the novel switches from high fantasy to science fiction, finally taking us to the stars with the newly founded Dark Angels Legion. The final segment of the novel follows the Dark Angels including Zahariel and Nemiel as they oversee the transition of a human world named Sarosh into the Imperium. That the Saroshi are planning treachery is obvious and the climactic confrontation with a Chaos daemon inevitable.

Descent of Angels is an interesting story that takes in the grand sweep of Caliban's history both before and after the coming of the Imperium, but the changes of style within the novel and its dubious relevance to the overall series have left it one of the Heresy's least-regarded installments. For me the most compelling scene was when Zahariel wandered into an area of corrupted woodland and encountered the Watchers in the Dark, one of the most curious facets of the Dark Angels' mysterious lore. The Dark Angels are a faction made deliberately mysterious for the point of being mysterious by the loremasters of Games Workshop, and this novel manages to explain their history while still revealing very little about them; the Lion's decision to banish Luther and a chunk of his Legion back to Caliban remains as arbitrary and confounding as ever. This novel seems like a missed step in the triumphal march of the Heresy series, but twenty-six books later the series is still going from strength to strength so despite this little stumble the Heresy series, unlike the banished Dark Angels, has not fallen.

The story of the Dark Angels continues into the Heresy itself in Mike Lee's sequel Fallen Angels.