Evan Dicken’s second Black Library short story, Acts of Sacrifice takes a similar approach to his debut The Path to Glory and tells a tale set before the Age of Sigmar. This time it takes place during the Age of Chaos, as the Order of the Ardent Star faces total destruction at the hands of a horde of Khornate ravagers. With the Order’s fortress besieged and its Master dead by the blade of the horde’s champion, Sir Anaea leads a handful of her remaining knights out in search of a more defensible holdout, hoping to find safety and a chance of survival.
One of the joys of Age of Sigmar is the unbridled opportunity it presents for strange and interesting new characters, creatures and locations. Here, Dicken explores a little of the Flamescar Plateau in Aqshy, populating it with golden knights who worship Myrmidia and ride demidroths, and while it’s all done with a light touch to fit into the constraints of a short story, everything feels real and worth exploring. Narratively it’s straightforward but satisfying, avoiding the pitfall of focusing too much on the fighting and instead taking a bleak look at the inevitable outcome of heroism and sacrifice in the Mortal Realms. In short, it’s much more interesting than the rather generic cover suggests!
This was released as part of the 2018 Black Library Advent Calendar – click here to see the main page for the Advent Calendar, with links to all of the reviews.
Check out the main Age of Sigmar page on Track of Words.
Did you notice mistakes in the annotation on the Black Library website? Aenea – Anaea, Drakenount – Drakemount, to be honest itts a bit disappointing to see such careless work.
I did, although I’m not too concerned about a few minor details like that. Between them BL, FW and GW put out an awful lot of new products on their sites, so I guess it’s inevitable that a few things will be missed. As long as they’re correct in the actual stories, I don’t mind.
I mean, the problem is that the wrong names are just unsearchable on the website. I experienced such issues several times, for example if you want to find all stories written by Rachel Harrison, ‘A Company Of Shadows’ will not be present in search list because someone just forgot to add the author on the page, check it out: https://www.blacklibrary.com/new-titles/warhammer-40000/eshort-a-company-of-shadows.html. This is what I’m talking about, and believe me, it is not a single instance, unfortunately.