Deathfire is the thirty-second book in the Horus Heresy series. Originally published in 2015 by Nick Kyme, Deathfire follows the exploits of the shattered Salamander legion, as they cart their dead primarch Vulkan back to the home world of Nocturne. In a sense, Deathfire is the third in a sequence of novels built around Vulkan. As a collection they’re a little one-note, with very similar structures – at least with regard to Vulkan as a character. Book 26, Vulkan Lives, reveals that Vulkan survived the betrayal at Isstvan V and has been captured by the villainous Konrad Curze. He spends the whole book captured, and at the end he escapes. Book 27, The Unremembered Empire, has Vulkan crash into the surface of the planet Macragge. He spends the whole book crazy, and at the end he gets killed. Book 32, Deathfire, has the Salamanders take Vulkan’s body back to Nocturne. He spends the whole book dead, and at the end he comes back to life. It’s three books of deferred action, in that Steven Moffat way where you’re mostly waiting around in case something interesting happens in the episode after the one you’re currently watching. Not the most satisfying exercise.

Deathfire also features something of a staple of the Horus Heresy and Warhammer more broadly. It’s a franchise that loves to toss around names and titles from classical literature. For instance, the Thousand Sons are a legion of sorcerers: their home planet is Prospero, named after Shakespeare’s exiled wizard. The Space Wolves similarly live on Fenris, named after the wolf from Old Norse legend. In Deathfire, the Salamanders travel through a treacherous warp storm. Naturally, the heavily referenced text of choice is the Odyssey. Their ship is called the Charybdis, as in Scylla and Charybdis; the navigator is called Circe; and the shipmaster, set in parallel to Odysseus, is called Adyssian. As Deathfire proceeds, it zeroes in more closely on the Odyssey’s siren episode. Adyssian imagines himself as “the captain of a schooner … standing at the wheel, sails bulging, almost tearing themselves apart, his fearful crew lashed to their posts.” The sirens, creatures from the warp, appear soon after, invading the ship to murder and terrorize its occupants.

And – you know, obviously we see this sort of referencing all the time. It’s by no means unique to 40K: an overwhelming number of texts and franchises invoke classical allusion. Mass Effect has the character Legion, a robot made up of hundreds of programs – and so named after the Biblical Legion (“my name is Legion, for we are many”). Deus Ex: Human Revolution is built around the themes and imagery of Icarus – we could list these things forever. Reference to the classics is a standard way of adding prestige and weight to a story, grounding it in a long-standing cultural and aesthetic heritage. It’s not just the act of citing old texts: it’s also that much of our classical art and literature itself harks back to earlier narratives. When you think of high art – Renaissance painting, say – it’s all Bibles and Greek myth. The Last Supper, The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus. Classical allusion not only connects you to older works; it is itself something that the great works have been doing for well over a thousand years. It’s a way to elevate a story out of the prosaic modern and into the realm of timeless myth.

In Deathfire, then, and across the Heresy and 40K more broadly, we see classical allusion invoked as a form of aesthetic symmetry. The Salamanders, like Odysseus, are trying to get back home. That’s a fairly normal, stock-standard function of allusion. But it also, I think, points to another element of the Heresy saga. The Horus Heresy is a foundational event in the 40K universe. The outcomes are set in stone. It’s sort of like watching the Star Wars prequels: you know the trajectory. Horus will do a heresy. He’ll fight the Emperor, and he’ll fail and die, and the universe thereafter will rot in civil war. A constant theme in these books, unsurprisingly, is fatalism. As Horus falls, there are a bunch of people who know what’s happening and try to stop it. In Fulgrim, the Emperor’s Children receive warning from the Eldar. In Legion, the Cabal reaches out to the Alpha Legion, enlisting them in the fight against Chaos. In ‘The Voice’, a short story in Tales of Heresy, one psyker even comes back in time from the future to try and warn people of what’s to come. None of these attempts avoid disaster. Warnings aren’t heeded, interventions don’t work. All of these different powers and forces dig in their heels, trying to change the course of history, and none of it works. That’s the pathos of the Horus Heresy. It’s a series about inevitability, about powerlessness. It’s about the overwhelming tidal power of historical change, and the insignificance of the individual life. Change is the ocean, and you are a grain of sand.

Within that context, the classical and literary allusions serve as an aspect of fatalism. Names prefigure characters and groups towards their destinies. Adyssian was always going to be cast into a storm. He was always going to love Circe. That’s who he is. That’s from where he takes his name. Allusion is an organizing principle over Adyssian’s life. It is a deterministic force. As a literary device, allusion represents the power of inevitability and historical determinism in Adyssian’s life, and more broadly across the Horus Heresy. Adyssian’s name tells you that his life is scripted, set forth by powers that are beyond his comprehension and certainly beyond his control. He will experience certain things as surely as if he was a character in a story.