***On the 15th July 2017, Warbeast won the Legend Award at the Gemmell Awards – a much deserved accolade!***
Book six in Black Library’s ten-strong Realmgate Wars series, Warbeast by Gav Thorpe is the first what you might call ‘full-length’ novel in the series, and Gav’s first Age of Sigmar novel. Taking place in Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, it sees two Chambers of Stormcast Eternals – the Warbeasts of the Celestial Vindicators and the Silverhands of the Knights Excelsior – battling against vast numbers of skaven and Chaos-corrupted tribes to secure a vital realmgate. For Lord-Celestant Arkas Warbeast it’s a very personal mission, as he returns to the lands of his birth, lands he failed to protect as a mortal.
Narratively speaking this is a classic fantasy quest story – protagonists are sent on a quest, face setbacks, learn important lessons and eventually triumph. The idea is to keep things simple and give the characters chance to breathe, and for a series which has up to this point consisted exclusively of novellas, short stories and a single short novel, that’s no bad thing. The Stormcast are still very new and relatively under-developed, but Gav takes advantage of the decent word count and fairly straightforward plot to dig into these characters more than we’ve seen in the previous stories. There are lots of characters, some of which suffer a bit from the Stormcasts’ overly-structured and slightly po-faced archetypes (lots of Lord-somethings), but they’re definitely starting to be fleshed out more.
Having contrasting Warrior Chambers is a good way of differentiating between the various Stormcast characters, and here the Warbeasts and Silverhands clearly have different roles to play. Arkas is ultimately the main protagonist, visibly affected by returning to his old kingdom and interestingly connected to the nature and power of the realm, but Theuderis Silverhand gets plenty of page time and acts as a nice counterweight to Arkas. His logical, organised mind and sense of order, reflected in the character of his Chamber, is very much at odds with the Warbeasts’ boisterous nature, and the relationship between the two Lord-Celestants is suitably strained at times. Arkas is the more likeable of the two protagonists, and his fiery nature adds some humour and lightness to what could otherwise have been a little dry.
The skaven are largely portrayed as pretty gross and a little creepy, which is more appropriate than the slightly slapstick depictions they sometimes get; they’re effective antagonists, even if there’s not much sense that they’ll really provide too much of an obstacle to the Stormcast. There’s plenty of action as the skaven marshal first their disposable allies and then their own forces against the Stormcast, and it’s all enjoyable stuff – skaven are so much more fun to read about than endless Khornate warriors, and the development of the Stormcast as characters helps add a touch of pathos where it might otherwise be lacking in characters who never truly die. Where Warbeast works best, though, are the moments which allow characters to breathe, of which there are a good few. It’s not the paciest or most complex of plots, but it does an excellent job of layering genuinely interesting details onto these particular characters, and it’s probably the most complete and effective book in the series so far.
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