One of the things with these really long-term episodic narratives is that over time, you end up with contradictions. Barry Allen reads a comic book where Jay Garrick is a fictional character, but Barry and Jay both know the same Superman. This sort of contradiction happens so often that there are a range of standard solutions. There’s the multiverse, the retcon, the James Bond ‘just ignore it’ – there’s all sorts. The Warhammer 40,000 universe takes the approach of setting out a central, authoritative voice, overriding previous discrepancies. That’s part of the impetus for the sixty-volume Horus Heresy: it’s the final word on the events of the Heresy, a major event in the 40K universe.

In that context, it’s worth noting that even though the Heresy is authoritative, it’s not comprehensive. You never get a complete picture of where everybody is, what everyone’s doing. For example, after the censure of Magnus, small units of Space Wolves were sent to monitor each of the other primarchs – to ensure their loyalty, and to strike at any further betrayal. I’m about halfway through the series, and we’ve had at least three references to those executioner squads so far. They appear in Book #21, Fear to Tread, where one squad travels with the Blood Angels primarch Sanguinius. The survivors of the squad sent to monitor the Alpha Legion are butchered in Book #31, in the short story ‘Hunter’s Moon’, and ‘Howl of the Hearthworld’ in Book #32 has a squad of Wolves complain about the very boring assignment of being sent to monitor the ramrod loyalist Rogal Dorn. I wouldn’t be surprised if those three were all we got. Certainly no-one expects to see a separate mention of every executioner squad: we’re not going to get an itemized list of all the things they end up doing. Despite its immense, sixty-volume scope, the Heresy is not an exhaustive record.

And that’s by design, right. The Heresy isn’t meant to be an encyclopedia. It’s selective. It editorializes. It tells a story as much by what it includes as by what it excludes. ‘Hunter’s Moon’, for example, the Alpha Legion story, excludes most of the direct conflict. It’s told instead from the perspective of a bunch of fishermen. These guys are just hanging out and minding their own business, on some random remote world, and suddenly they find a crashed spaceship with Space Marines inside. The fishermen rescue one of the Space Marines, Felbjorn, hauling him onto the fishing boat. They tend to his wounds, and learn he’s the last survivor of the Space Wolves sent to monitor Alpharius, the Alpha Legion primarch. The squad was attacked and nearly wiped out when the Alpha Legion declared for Horus. Felbjorn relates this story to the fishermen, and then the Alpha Legion show up and finish the job. Bummer.

On the whole, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is fine. It’s a reasonable short story. Probably the worst thing you could say about it is that it’s crammed into a poor collection – nineteen short stories, no overarching theme or cohesion, many of them ten-minute audio dramas repackaged for publication after being developed for a digital Warhammer advent calendar back in 2013. It’s hard to feel positive about any of these stories in such a stocking-stuffer context. That said, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is framed in a genuinely interesting way. It features a doubled process of relaying information. It is a second-hand story, told twice after the fact. Felbjorn tells the fishermen about his battle with the Alpha Legion, and then the broader narrative is framed as one of the fishermen retelling the story to his apprentice, almost a lifetime after the original events. That relaying is a key part of the story’s meaning. It suggests distance, disconnect. We don’t experience the action first-hand, on the front lines. We’re not positioned in the heat of that initial betrayal. We’re at a remove, with the fishermen, hanging out on some random planet and discovering the story really by accident. That suggests something about the executioner squads more broadly. They aren’t key figures in the conflict. As different legions declare their loyalty or rebellion, some of the executioner squads become unnecessary, and some of them are swiftly butchered. The fact that we don’t have stories about every single squad, and the fact that we’re only hearing this tale twice removed – it gives a sense of scale to the conflict. People get lost in the Heresy. The war’s too big to keep track of everyone. Some stories can only be told from a distance.