A Horus Heresy Primarchs story set during the Great Crusade, A Lesson in Iron sees David Guymer tackle his favoured Iron Hands and give their primarch Ferrus Manus a little more time in the spotlight. Pursuing the fleeing remnants of the greenskin Rust empire and determined to finish them off, Ferrus takes his flagship – the Fist of Iron – into a strange warp rift. Instead of orks waiting for them, the Iron Hands find an unknown Imperial ship which appears to belong to their legion. What they find upon boarding that ship appears impossible, though it hints at a strange future.
Great Crusade-era Iron Hands stories provide rare opportunities to learn more about one of the Heresy’s most (understandably) underused figures, and despite being fairly brief (even for a short story) there are flashes here of some interesting characters. The setup – the tail end of a campaign; Ferrus determined to prove his superiority; the rift and its unexpected contents – is solid and engaging, if somewhat disjointed, but when the action kicks in things get a bit over-complicated and the expected payoff never really materialises. There’s the core of a great story here, but it probably needed a longer word count or a tighter narrative to really be effective.
This was originally released in the Black Library Events Anthology 2017/18 and then 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 Horus Heresy page on Track of Words.
