# Tales of Heresy, and the end of the line for me



## kstills (Sep 6, 2009)

I've just today finished 'Wolf at the Door', Mike Lee's addition to Tales of Heresy. 

Spoiler alert, if you want to be surprised (though why you would only the Emperor or one of the guys writing this tripe would know) read no futher. 

The story starts out pretty well. The Space Wolves are at the end of their pacification of some system, and are accepting the surrender of the 'Tyrants' who, in a very despotic fashion, ruled several star systems prior to the arrival of the Imperium. 

At their surrender, the Wolflord declines to take the lives of the Tyrants. He recounts the terrible crimes they have committed, and during the rest of the story Bullveye (the Wolflord) is haunted by his need to have brought pacification to a human civilisation because of these Tyrants. 

So why doesn't he kill them for their crimes? Who the hell knows? 

The Wolves pick up a signal from another system which is definitely human in origin. They respond with a squad of Marines led by Bullveye in the hopes that they can bring this world into the Imperium without pacification. What they find is a world preyed on by the Dark Eldar, who make an appearance shortly after the Wolves make landfall. The leaders of Antimon (the name of the world) are hostile at first, but the appearance of the Eldar drive the Antimonans and the Wolves into an alliance. 

After the standard Marines against all odds battle resulting in the destruction of the leader of the Eldar coupled with the (finally) appearance of the Imperial Battle Group, the Eldar are driven from the world and both the Astartes and the Antimonans rejoice in the end of the conflict. 

At which point, three of the Antimonans who were fighting with Bullveye against the Eldar inform him that their planet does not wish to be part of the Imperium, and that they will fight the Marines to defend their newly won independence. Bullveye kills all three and orders an orbital bombardment of the world (of 120million souls) while they are still in the streets celebrating. 

In summation, Bullveye declines to kill 6 Tyrants of known traitorous behavior responsible for the decimation of whole systems of stars. However, based on the negative response of three guerilla fighters who aside from one being the son of a former Senator (implying some kind of quasi democratic form of government) none of the three displaying any kind of authority to speak for the entire planet, he orders the almost complete destruction (implied, not confirmed) of the planet he most recently fought to free from the Eldar. 

Pathetic writing, moronic logic (Dan Abnett excluded from this diatribe). I kept hoping that the writers of this series would be able to pull off what was progressively getting to be an increasingly unlikely hail mary pass, that is making sense of the convolutions and logical dead ends that this series has fallen into. However, this marks the end for me. I expected that this series would provide insight into the history of the Imperium, but all it seems to want to do is provide a motive to kill billions of people. 

It doesn't take 15 books to accomplish that goal, nor will it get any more of my money.


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