Reddit reviews Ruinstorm (46) (The Horus Heresy)

"The evidence of the Pilgrim’s passing was obvious.Enormous constructs filled the system, dwarfing the worlds. The vessels of the fleets once again had to fight from being captured by the gravitational pull of the gigantic bodies. The objects were so immense, their shapes extended far beyond the limits of the Episimos System, beyond the range of the scans. They might, Guilliman thought, reach as far as other systems. They might be light years in size.Objects. Shapes. Constructs. Guilliman hunted for words of greater precision, words that would describe the immensities he saw, and give him a measure of control. The whining, spine-grinding sound made it hard for him to think, but even in silence, language would have failed him. There were no names for these things. The daemon fortress at least had been recognisable. Its obscenity had been in its size. The constructs in the Episimos System were geometry run amok, angles building on and into other angles. On the nearest mass, the side facing the Samothrace was dominated by a formation that seemed to be both an extrusion and a depression. The pounding in Guilliman’s head grew worse when he tried to force sense onto the formation, and he turned away.‘Analysis,’ he said, maintaining order on the bridge.‘Warp,’ said Prayto, breathing hard.‘Granted. But what is the materium correlative? The fortress was stone and brass. The abominations have something we can recognise as flesh. What is this?’Guilliman spoke with more frustration than he intended. The surfaces appeared to be smooth. The objects were carved from single blocks millions and billions of miles on a side. Colours swam and rippled across them, deep rotten violets and greens. Patterns like the scales of reptiles appeared and disappeared. The constructs had hides, or they were ice, or they were a dream. Lines curved and straightened, a language of monsters preaching its lessons to the materium. The meaning of the lesson crawled inside Guilliman’s chest. He tore his eyes from the flowing runes before he could understand them and be wounded.He was not sure how many of the constructs there were in the system. A few floated alone in the void, serene in their lonely horror. Others were linked to one another, forming complexes so vast, they extended beyond the range of the scanners.Even more than the fortress, these monoliths were the death of reason. There was no logic to the structures. Their material was the reification of madness. Their foundation was the bones of the Emperor’s dream."

Ignoring Guilliman's wild speculation, Madail filled an entire solar systems with strange shapes and constructs millions and billions of miles in size.

“A grey sphere surrounded the Davin System. At first, from the point of translation, it had appeared almost featureless, except for a porous quality that made the Lion think of dilapidated stone. Its gravitational well was weak, barely pulling at the fleet.‘Why do I feel like I’m looking at a grave?’ Holguin asked.‘Not a grave,’ the Lion said as the fleets moved closer and the details of the sphere resolved in the oculus. ‘An ossuary.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘This thing is made of bones.’The Invincible Reason came within a thousand miles of the surface of the necrosphere. Auspex scans zeroed in on small areas and projected magnified hololiths on the tacticarium screens. Individual bones and complete skeletons interlaced, creating a cracked, knobby plain. There were bodies of humans, eldar, orks – of every xenos race the Lion had ever encountered, and an even greater number he did not know.Abyssal solemnity radiated from the necrosphere. It was perfect stillness, the quiet of the end of everything. Beyond it, the frenzy of the Ruinstorm was more intense, and the bones appeared to float in a sea of agonised colours. The materium bled around Davin, and the system was death lurking at the centre of the wound.The Lion ordered an exploratory bombardment. The Invincible Reason, the Honoured Deeds and the Intolerant fired nova cannons. It was like shooting through fog. The beams cut through the necrosphere. Vast clouds of debris rose into the void, and a chasm opened, wide enough for the combined fleets and stretching for tens of thousands of miles.‘What does this barrier mean?’ Holguin wondered.‘At this moment,’ the Lion said, ‘it signifies only its own weakness. Death falls before us. We will not be stopped.’The Lion took the Dark Angels into the necrosphere. The other fleets followed, descending into the endless grey."

\^ Madail surrounds the entire Davin Solar System with a sphere of bones.

“The physical passage through the necrosphere was easy. The mental one was less so. Guilliman, Prayto and Gorod marked the journey in Guilliman’s chambers. They stood before a floor-to-ceiling window. As the Samothrace journeyed through the shell, the nature of the necrosphere became clearer. Grey remains, broken from their moorings by the blast, floated past the vessels. The boneyard of the infinite contained more than the skeletons of beings that had once been alive; there were the skeletons of dead vessels, of cities and of worlds. The inanimate had turned to bone. Iron and stone, alloy and gas, everything was bone and cold and grey. Planets had ribcages now, and cities had skulls, the better to show that they had died.Other corpses were harder to identify. Some had the shapes of colossal beings, human and xenos. Others had crystalline forms. Still others were spheres themselves, smooth as the back of skulls.‘Are those statues?’ Gorod asked.‘They are still bones,’ Guilliman said. ‘They are something that has died.’Prayto grunted in psychic pain. ‘Hopes,’ he said. ‘Dreams. Philosophies.’‘The forces we have been combatting favour symbolism in their attacks,’ Guilliman said. Prayto was speaking from a more visceral knowledge, but Guilliman could see the possible meaning in the copses Gorod had pointed out. If statues represented abstractions, the skeletons were the demises of those ideas. It was as if, in their death, they had been given flesh to rot away, and bones to mark not the promises that their existence had made, but its futility."

\^ The Necrosphere doesn't just have the bones of mortal beings, but also cities, planets, empires, hopes, and dreams. The intangible becomes physical there.

“The grey did not go on forever. It was, in the end, what it had appeared to be, a shell. It was a few million miles thick, a hair’s breadth in comparison to its diameter. The fleets emerged into the encircled void of the Davin System. For the first time since it had begun to rage, the Ruinstorm was invisible, hidden behind the necrosphere.We’re in the eye of the storm, Guilliman thought. The calm here was a lie.Ahead, centred in the oculus, glinting in the grey darkness, was Davin. The shine of its reflected light was the cold of the most profound death."

\^ The necrosphere not only surrounds a solar system, but is also a few million miles thick.

“At the centre of the explosion, the void was torn, and the immaterium reclaimed its own. An implosion began. Its energy ball reversed its growth, shrinking in a single moment to a point. It caught the fleeing rubble of the ship, and pulled it all in. In its absolute violence, the implosion unleashed the second shockwave on the aether. It collided with the first. In their intersection, they reduced the daemonic fleet and the swarm of bones to dust.The scream faded as the revenant ships returned to oblivion. Deprived of the force that animated them, their bonds broken, they lost substance. They became ragged phantoms sailing through the uniform void of grey. Then they were shadows. Then echoes. Then only memories in the minds of those who had seen them.The destruction of Davin and its works rushed outwards from the system, further and further, carried by the agony of the warp, transforming the materium at speeds far greater than light.Sanguinius looked out through the viewing block of the Vyssini, and he saw the wound before he heard the new cry. With the necrosphere gone, the Ruinstorm was visible again, and it was in agony. The aurora of madness still twisted across the galaxy, but there was a gap. A chasm of untainted void broke up the storm, as if a break had been blasted through a firestorm. Or a spear thrust through the body of a great beast."

\^ When Madail is killed, the whole Necrosphere turns to dust.

Links to the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Ruinstorm-Horus-Heresy-David-Annandale/.../178496672X

https://www.amazon.com/Ruinstorm-Horus-Heresy-David...ebook/dp/B075V3FRZ9