Night Lords: The Omnibus

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Shadow knight - another adb short book , not my favourite but still worth half hour of your time , audiobook can be found here The aforementioned torture/murder scenes make up my most severe negative critique but the confusing characters make a good second. None seem to have set personalities, changing regularly whenever the plot needs to move in a new direction. The books give off a feeling of a complete theme over the trilogy as well, which the author eludes to in the Night Lords omnibus’s introduction. The stories in each are somewhat independent but connected by the characters, but you also see a rising war band in book one, it’s continued trials and triumphs in book two and finally it’s erosion and fall into darkness in book three. This final book is indeed the darkest, for both the characters and the events. The Night Lords -- lead by Talos , the Prophet -- make for their ancient fortress world to prepare their last stand against their Eldar hunters. In the mean time they enact some wanton slaughter on entire populations, and prepare an atrocity for the Imperium on a scale that baffles me even now.

When Talos & co meet the arch regent for the first time, the regent asks them: who are you and why are you slaughtering my people? Talos answers that he doesn't need to give him answers and is about to kill him when the Night Lords suddenly urgently need to leave. When they return to the regent a while later nothing had changed but for no reason the regent became a VIP. Talos now needs him to tell him where the astropath guild is and there is plenty of time where Talos informs the regent of all their plans and ambitions. Yet he was initially just going to axe him, no questions asked? It makes no sense. And Aaron Dembski-Bowden did not just meet my expectations, oh no. He did the impossible, and exceeded them, which makes Void Stalker one of the best novels that I’ve read in 2012 so far that were released in the same year. This stands alongside novels such as Anne Lyle’s superb The Alchemist of Souls. But I’ve rambled for too long. Without further ado, after the blurb, let’s explain why I felt that the conclusion to the Night Lords Trilogy is as good as I felt it was. that is, until everybody dies at the end. Don't worry, this fact is "spoiled" at the very start of the book, but still the way they go is glorious. For some, unexpected, characters the end is downright dramatic; for others, also unexpected, you get the feeling that they got what was coming to them (be it good or bad).I've seen many posts about "what night lords books can I read ?" And "is there any more lore for night lords ?" And a lot of them seem to get hung up on "The night lords omnibus". Although very good I feel a lot of players are looking for a bit more depth on some of the existing Night lord characters, so I've attempted to compile some for people (not claiming this is a definitive guide but hopefully more than on other posts I've seen) Talos, the 'Soul Hunter' is the main character of the tale. Talos is a haunted individual. Haunted by the former greatness of his Legion, by the former greatness of a cause now long abandoned, and haunted by the ideal of the noble warrior that he truly believes the Night Lords once were and could be.

The unblinking eyes were glittering emerald lenses, dewy with a faint sheen from the moisture spray that hissed subtly from Deltrian’s tear ducts once every fifteen seconds. Talos had no idea why the tech-priest’s eye lenses must be kept moist, they were hardly human eyes in need of lids and juices to prevent them drying out. The hunters have become the hunted. The Night Lords flee to the dark fringes of the Imperium to escape their relentless pursuers – the eldar of Craftworld Ulthwé. Their flight takes them to the carrion world of Tsagualsa, where their primarch died and their Legion was broken. There, history will repeat itself as a deadly assassin stalks the shadows, and the Night Lords are drawn into a battle they are destined to lose." I will say this for Dembski-Bowden, he avoids most of the pitfalls that I associate with both Chaos and Space Marines. In the former, the Night Lords are a nice break from the frothing-at-the-mouth murder machines I generally expect from Chaos worshippers. I’m not even sure if the Night Lords truly worship Chaos at all. They’re definitely aligned (and serve Abaddon the Despoiler), but they reject the taint of Chaos, even going so far as to cast out or kill those so afflicted. Make no mistakes though, they are an evil bunch. They murder their way across space, killing innocents in the thousands, all while laughing about their victories. Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence, the Phoenix Lord of the Howling Banshees themselves in this book was what I would expect a normal Howling Banshee Exarch to fight and act like. The epilogue also bothered me. How is Lucoryphus alive? But I can't say what bothered me exactly about the last part it just...it bothered me.

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A lesson in darkness - prepare yourself for a full scale blood bath as the night lords make planetfall This is part of the brilliance of Aaron's writing- Talos spends so much of the series truly believing his fanciful notion that the Night Lords were noble, that they were true warriors, even if their methods of forcing compliance and submission were rather more brutal than even what the Space Wolves or World Eaters would do. This is made all the more believable by seeing Talos through the eyes of two slaves, Septimus-the 7th and Octavia-the 8th. Through the eyes of these two mortals, both of whom, in their own way, show their unwavering devotion to Talos throughout the tale, we see the true greatness within Talos as an individual. Talos' greatness, both as a warrior and even, dare I say it, as a man, is made all the more apparent by its contrast with the rest of the members of his Claw, the warband he's attached to, and the rest of the Legion as a whole. The entire trilogy portrays a band of genuine villains, who you cannot help but root for towards the end. This is because there are countless moments throughout that are absolutely crushing, and that would normally have you cheering for the downfall of the "bad guy", but upon reading them makes you empathise with the characters. Perhaps none more than this when the central figure, Talos, in a moment of pure innocence, after thousands of years of war, terror, and conquest, in the name of a father that hated and abandoned him, simply states he only ever wanted to be a hero. Brutal. Mr. Abnett has created a cadre of characters in the Gaunt's series that I have grown to be very fond of. It took a few books, but once I was in, I was in, and EVERY one of their deaths breaks my heart, but it makes the series excellent. Mr. Dembski-Bowden achieved that same level of amazing character pathos in a shorter amount of time with First Claw and the slaves.

I felt that Talos was doing some things without much explanation as to why he was doing those things. He makes some pretty big decisions without seeming to put much thought into them.It feels like ADB really has a grip on each and every character by this point, and knows how to put them through hell. As I noted w/the first book, ADB has a gift of creating unlikable, yet enjoyable to read, characters, and that's true here. One of the standout moments is the astropath (I'm blanking on her name) going to warn Talos of an emergency, but he's in an .... excrutiatorium (???), where he's torturing a bench of flensed humans, and she can't stop vomiting & being horribly offended to get her words out. It's a nice little reminder that while Talos seems like an emo soft boy protagonist at times, he's still utterly & totally a Chaos Marine.