Creed: Ashes of Cadia – Jude Reid

Jude Reid’s debut novel for Black Library, Creed: Ashes of Cadia introduces readers to the character of Lord Castellan Ursula Creed, in a story about the burden of legacy and questions of Cadian identity. Pulled away from her current campaign by the returned Primarch Guilliman himself, Ursula is entrusted with a daring mission to return to what’s left of her homeworld and retrieve a weapon purportedly left behind by her father, Ursarkar E. Creed, before the Fall of Cadia. She knows it’s a propaganda exercise as much as anything, but she has her reasons for accepting it. Far from a glorious return home though, this proves to be a clumsy, chaotic mission driven – to Ursula’s mind – by all the wrong reasons, and plagued by disaster right from the off.

Ursula is obviously the main draw here, but there’s an ensemble of supporting characters who do plenty of heavy lifting too, from newly-minted trooper Shael Laskari to Mac Ossian, once a field-medicae but now a disgraced penal legionnaire. It’s a real cross-section of the Guard, designed as an in-universe propaganda tool (a broad range of Cadia’s finest, returning home in triumph…in theory) but also serving as an interesting mixture of perspectives on the mission and the events that play out. Trapped on the surface of a once-familiar world that’s now twisted in unsettling ways, the only option left to try and see the mission through, everyone is exhausted, nobody’s safe, and the odds are utterly stacked against them (not least with a sinister transhuman presence shadowing them, determined to use them to progress its own plans).

For all the frantic, desperate action as the Cadians fight for survival, the focus is really on the pressures they’re under rather than the fighting itself. Ursula herself has always worked to step out from her father’s shadow, but now she finds herself dragged back to her past and her family connection, struggling anew to reconcile the father she thought she knew with the legend that the Imperium still sees him as. She’s the beating heart of the story, and the steel core that keeps her dwindling force together, but she’s still vulnerable behind her facade of command, not just physically – she’s Cadian, but still only human – but emotionally and psychologically too. Wrestling with her father’s legacy is a key theme here, but Reid also cleverly explores the way Ursula has to deal with being subtly undermined and needled by those around her, something most 40k protagonists don’t generally have to put up with.

There’s a real old-school 40k vibe at play here – no sentimentality at play, just the cold, callous unfairness of war and desperately long odds of survival. Reid packs the story full of genuinely brutal moments, not to mention a fair few eye-watering medical scenes (putting her own medical knowledge to good use), taking full advantage of the range of viewpoints to ensure maximum impact in each scene. At times a few plot elements do require a bit of additional suspension of disbelief, and it’s a shame there isn’t a little more emphasis on the propaganda angle once things properly gets going, but all told it comes together into a powerful story, well paced and difficult to put down. It works great as a standalone tale, especially for anyone interested in learning about Ursula, but it also finds its own niche within the wider Cadian range, nicely complementing other recent releases and adding additional detail to a faction that’s becoming increasingly interesting.

Review copy provided by the author

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