Gav Thorpe’s Blackstone Fortress short story Purity is a Lie features several of the same characters as Darius Hinks’ novel Blackstone Fortress, and sees the firebrand priest Taddeus the Purifier join Rogue Trader Janus Draik on an expedition to the Fortress itself. Taddeus despises the faithless masses surrounding him on Precipice, but when he’s invited by Draik to join the expedition he recognises the need to rise above his distaste in order to enact the Emperor’s will. Battling through the Fortress, he’s begrudgingly forced to accept that perhaps his faith isn’t the only thing he needs in order to succeed.
As an introduction to the setting this offers a short but pretty faithful overview of the locations, adventurers and enemies from the game, and gives a decent feel for the tone of it. Strangely though, it doesn’t tie in with Darius’ novel, instead offering an alternative interpretation of these characters (including Taddeus and Draik’s first meeting), which you might charitably attribute to the warping effects of the Fortress…or perhaps to an editorial oversight. That notwithstanding it’s an entertaining enough story, touching on the challenges for a hardline religious fanatic out on the frontier of the Imperium, albeit a little too short and abrupt to really dig too far into this interesting subject.
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.
