# Nemiel and Zahariel's future (spoilers)



## Angel of Blood (Aug 18, 2010)

So anyone else think we're going to see the two cousins come to blows on Caliban? Certainly seem to be setting the stage for it


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## Lord of the Night (Nov 18, 2009)

Definitely. Zahariel will win, he's a Librarian and a powerful enough one that the Emperor comments on his prowess. Nemiel is a Chaplain, strong but he'll die.


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## dark angel (Jun 11, 2008)

It is pretty certain that it will happen. I actually hope Nemiel will die, but will manage to kill Zahariel somewhat in the process of doing so. If done right, it could be one of the more epic moments of the Heresy.


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## Lord of the Night (Nov 18, 2009)

Gav Thorpe is joining the Heresy team so odds are he'll be writing the final Dark Angels novel, though since that takes place after Terra it might be more then 3 books for the Sons of the Lion. Perhaps four or five.


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## Angel of Blood (Aug 18, 2010)

On the other hand i see Nemiel surviving and possibly Zahariel aswell. Nemeil then becoming the first of the Redemptors and Zahariel possibly being captured and tortured and forced to repent under Nemiel


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## Lord of the Night (Nov 18, 2009)

Hmm, that is a plausible theory but I think at least one of them wont survive Caliban. Zahariel as a Fallen and Nemiel as a Loyalist. Though question is which one is right?.


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## brother captain sean (Oct 7, 2010)

Spioler alert about pandorax.


I recently read pandorax and I think Zahariel becomes one of the 8 founding grand masters of the grey knights. He has been in suspended animation for the last 10,000 years guarding something on pandorax. It's a good story.


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## Brother Lucian (Apr 22, 2011)

Alas, Nemiel's fate has been revealed long ago..

From 'The Lion' in The Primarchs


Nemiel is slain by the Lion's hands when he refuses to accept his Primarch breaking the Emperor's edict at Nikaea.


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## Vaz (Mar 19, 2008)

This is nearly 5 years old... fucking hell.


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## Angel of Blood (Aug 18, 2010)

Wow, the necromancy is strong in this one.

Also reminds me of how wank a decision Thrope made. What a complete fucking mess of a plot point, utterly waste what could have been a really good plot development point. Nice one! At least ADB gave us Corswain to give the Dark Angels at least one interesting character.


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## piemelke (Oct 13, 2010)

also zahariel future is kinda set,


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## ckcrawford (Feb 4, 2009)

No Thorpe.... I don't like...

I seriously hope he doesn't write the Dark Angels finally. I see him putting the survivors of Istvaan in the story and destroying the traitor Dark Angels so easily the Caliban itself falls apart due to the raw powerful momentum of the blows dealt by the Istvaan Survivors onto the traitors. 

I would like to see a confrontation where you see a very perverse version of the traitor Dark Angel's realty and view of the Imperium, molded with some truth. The truth being some unknown past instances of the other loyal primarchs and the Emperor that we haven't seen before. 

I guess thats what attracted me to Astellan's account, before Gav Thorpe tried to intertwine power rangers and 40k. Though we see Astellan's accounts, and even feel truth, its still warped and you are left wondering. 

Thats one of my pet peeves of the Heresy, is that we don't quite see the power of the warp and chaos truly warp loyalty, good, or humane qualities, to where you question the validity of the Imperium. There maybe a few instances, that may have this, but they are very brief. I believe you spend much of the Heresy looking at the problem of the Primarchs and their legions, but not to many of warping of concepts, ideas, truth, and humanity.


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## Mob (Nov 14, 2010)

Angel of Blood said:


> Wow, the necromancy is strong in this one.
> 
> Also reminds me of how wank a decision Thrope made. What a complete fucking mess of a plot point, utterly waste what could have been a really good plot development point. Nice one! At least ADB gave us Corswain to give the Dark Angels at least one interesting character.


Yeah. Blatant authorial presence in stories is usually a terrible move, and I recall that being one of the worst I'd read in a while. Nemiel was a major character with at least two (admittedly screamingly obvious) satisfying plot uses, so his sudden removal because the incoming author didn't want to go down those roads was a real lurch. Thorpe seems like a very nice chap with less of an ego than some, so I'm hoping he didn't off Nemiel in such a clumsy and insulting way to show his disapproval of the other (banished) authors plot ideas. 

Perhaps he just thought having a loyalist Primarch literally decapitate one of his senior officers in front of everyone else for the crime of disagreeing with him would be considered super-cool and awesome and not just bloody stupid.


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## Phoebus (Apr 17, 2010)

I'll admit, I didn't particularly care for either Zahariel or Nemiel. Their back-stories weren't particularly interesting to me; their relationship never seemed to go beyond seemingly forced familial love and competitiveness; neither struck me as a full-fledged, distinct character. Zahariel just seemed to serve as a point-of-view character in some frustratingly vague situations. Nemiel just seemed to serve as a vehicle for some pretty frustrating assumptions about the Lion.

That having been said, I didn't care for the way Nemiel was done in. At the time, it felt like an instance of author's fiat. Was it? I don't know. On the one hand, I wouldn't be terribly shocked if the creative team decided this particular plot line wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, wasn't generating enough interest, and/or wasn't particularly fun to write. On the other, I hesitate to accept that Thorpe would end someone else's work in so blunt a manner.

I've come to think that Nemiel's death was indeed meant to end that particular plot line (which I'm guessing was meant to culminate with a confrontation between the chaplain and Zahariel), but was also meant to give birth to different angles. The problem is, I can't really think what those could be, other than some tired, oft-trod stuff. Nemiel's death could, for instance, fuel moral relativism argument (of the rather poor sort that we saw raised between Curze and Vulkan) between Zahariel and [insert Loyalist Dark Angel] when the Battle of Caliban happens: "You're no better!" type of stuff. At the very least, it strikes me as an attempt to get the Lion back into "mysterious", "might he be a bad guy?", and "could the complaints against him have been justified?" territory, since him being a taciturn, conflicted, but nonetheless noble and well-meaning wasn't (for some reason) enough.

Two things frustrate me about this situation:

1. I feel a great opportunity was missed. In noble Corswain and uncompromising Nemiel, the writing team had two characters who (assuming they survived the Heresy) could serve as a perfect microcosm of the conflict the Dark Angels went through when knowledge of the Fallen surfaced and the Inner Circle came to prominence. That would have been a delicious clash; both characters feeling they are fighting for the soul of their Legion, with one fanatically driven to destroy the lost cousin he thinks personifies Caliban's betrayal and the other trying to hold on to the tenets and ideals that once defined his brethren.

2. The story this happened in, _The Lion,_ was just really hit-and-miss for me. This is the same tale in which Thorpe introduced the most obvious deus ex machine device* in a while (literally, the solution to the conundrum of Thramas Crusade); and rather ham-fistedly had a decidedly loyalist primarch release the right-hand man of an avowed traitor primarch. In that sense, it was a case of bad news after bad news after bad news.

* Tuchulcha may very well not have been someone else's baby. I don't know. I sincerely hope it wasn't Thorpe's in the same way that I wouldn't wish it on any other author. At best, it's a questionable sequel to _Fallen Angels_ in the sense that the Lion is going after yet another secret/forgotten relic that can end the war. Really, it just serves as an excuse to yet again not have to try to convey some of the genius a primarch brings to the battlefield. That is, why try to solve the Thramas Crusade conundrum with strategy when you can introduce warp tech that allows you to perfectly ambush your opponents?


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