Void Stalker

Void Stalker is the third and final novel in the Night Lords trilogy. This time, our crew are hunted by the Aeldari of Craftworld Ulthwé, as they seek to destroy the legion where it had been destroyed before, Tsagualsa. Unlike the first two books in the trilogy, the Night Lords are alone now, and Talos is in charge. While this may seem to be smart as he is the prophet, recent premonitions have not turned out to be as accurate has they had been before. With Talos now in command, his view of the legion is more centre stage than it was in the Blood Reaver, and I like it a lot. Previously, in his discussions with Ruven, Talos agrees with him. Thinking that the legion has fallen from where it once was, and he wants them to start winning, and he tries to bring them back to what they were. Talos brinks his company to Tsagualsa, which is now inhabited by imperial colonist, and he ruins it. He slaughters civilians, deals good damage to a company of the Genesis Chapter, and blacks out a large chunk of space. This feels really great to see, even if what is happening is truly horrific. For 2 novels our protagonists have been the underdogs, struggling to get by, doing little but acting as pirates or small raiding parties for larger traitor forces. So seeing them do well on their own really shows how Talos is as a character, and what he wants the Night Lords to be, even if others like Xarl disagree on what they really are. With the other characters, we’ve also got Uzas again, and I think this book really solidifies him as one of my favourite characters in Warhammer fiction now. At some points in this novel we get to see him lucid, not just brief moments of reduced bloodlust, but actual lucid moments, like a more regular marine, and its an interesting contrast. On the other hand, even also got Cyrion, who gets more development in this book to show how much of a prick he his. And while he is truly a bad person, its completely believable that this is who he is. Also, to my surprise, Septimus and Octavia aren’t that bad in this book, they’re barely around. At the start I was afraid, its revealed that Octavia is pregnant, and I expected it to be a big plot point that everything revolved around, but it doesn’t. Now they just want to live their lives as relatively normally as they can, away from their slavery under the night lords, it makes sense. One more thing ill note about the characters that I didn’t realize until this book, but is true for the whole trilogy, is that they can all die. Of course characters can always die in novels, but if you read a Mephiston novel, you know he’ll survive, he has a model. None of these characters have models, so they can just be killed off if that’s what ADB decides, and that helps add suspense to combat when you realise it. Other neat parts of the book are things like a flashback to when Tsagualsa first fell after the death of Curze. Like with the flashbacks to the Siege of Terra in the last book it lets us see how the characters are slightly different. Here however I feel we get a bit more detail, we see Uzas more before his corruption, and even the First Claws previous leader. While this is interesting, I don’t feel it adds that much to the plot for it to be necessary. I also like how at a few points we really get to see how different marines are to mortals. Talos and Octavia talk a bit about morals, with Octavia obviously thinking Talos is kind of a psycho, but Talos just doesn’t really get how its bad because of how he was trained. Talos also stays awake for 3 weeks straight, which is just a neat little detail. One more little thing that I like here, and in the previous book, is how we get to see insignificant loyalist chapters doing things. Like, who cares about the Genesis Chapter? Very few I’d bet, but they are shown here, and I like that. There aren’t really any major negatives that I can think of, which is good, but I don’t know that I’ll say that its perfect, even if like Blood Reaver, it was pretty close. This novel excels in all the same ways to previous two did, and I don’t know that I could have asked for a better finale to the trilogy. How everything ends up is very bittersweet, which sounds like a weird way to describe a story about superhuman psycho murderers, but I do genuinely love these characters. I’d love it if there was more about them out there, but what we got is truly amazing. Maybe one day we can see what the Night Lords are doing after the 13th Black Crusade, one can only hope.