In Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s short story ‘Aurelian’, collected in the 2016 anthology Eye of Terra, something unusual happens: we get some hard numbers. “Even if I believed all of this,” says the traitor Lorgar, “I have one hundred thousand warriors. We would be dead the moment we make planetfall on the home world.” In theory that’s a banal detail. In the context of the Horus Heresy, it’s very odd. Let’s talk about why. The Horus Heresy is a long-running sci-fi series covering the Imperium’s civil war in the universe of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000. It is a 64-book series published over 17 years by 19 different authors. It’s a mammoth project. Over the past three years, I’ve been reading and writing about the Horus Heresy, starting with an essay about narrative agency back in 2022. Today we’re talking more about narrative structure. The fascinating thing about the Heresy, as a unit, is how it deals with scale. Sixty-four books is a lot. If it’s not unprecedented, it’s difficult to compare. The series has a literal cast of thousands, and many titles open with a list of Dramatis Personae, as if these were Shakespeare plays instead of wargaming tie-ins. In keeping with this vast, sweeping frame of view, the stories often deploy extremes of detail. Book #19, Know No Fear, opens with a flock of dates and numbers. On the first page we get a timestamp “[mark: -136.57.07]”, mention of the Space Marine Honorius Luciel (“captain, 209th”), another timestamp (“mark: -00.19.45”), and a number of executed crew members, written out rather than numerical (“three thousand seven hundred and nine”). It’s a narrative practice across the series. You can point to any title and pull out examples. In Book #39, Praetorian of Dorn, one character estimates some labour gangs as arriving in “an hour and fifty-six minutes, once the day’s heat had begun to cool.” In the Horus Heresy, scope is emphasised by detail. The very large is suggested by the very small. Honorius Luciel, captain of the 209th, implies the existence of at least two hundred and eight other squads, each with their own captain bearing his own name.

In that context, then, it shouldn’t be strange to hear about a hundred thousand Word Bearers. That sort of detail shouldn’t be unusual. You’d think all of these dates and numbers must give us a very granular view (an exhaustive view, even) of the moment-to-moment logistics of each Legion, but in fact that’s not the case. We spend a bunch of this series not knowing where people are. We often have a vague idea of what they’re doing, but it’s more based on character traits rather than actual traceable movement. Detail is passed over in favour of archetype. Rogal Dorn’s archetype is the siege master: he prepares Terra for the inevitable invasion. You won’t often see him, and you’ll hardly get any detail about the specifics of that preparation, but you know roughly what he’s doing. Similarly, in book #51, Slaves to Darkness, the traitor primarch Fulgrim is forced to summon his legion. The Emperor’s Children are scattered around the universe being nefarious pleasure harlots, and he brings them all together in the lead up to war. This is Chapter Fifteen:

“Out the call went, piercing time and space. It vibrated through the gene-laced blood of Fulgrim’s bastard sons. On his throne Eidolon heard it, and blood flooded the whites of his eyes. […] In a thousand places of suffering, the children of the Emperor heard and raised themselves from the pleasure of their slaughter. They rose with bitterness in their hearts, with joy, with apathy, but rise they did.”

The call goes out, three named characters hear it (I’ve left in only one, for length), and then there’s this broad vista of the Children rising up across the galaxy. Detail is implied rather than stated. It’s evoked rather than given directly. When we see Eidolon, he’s not doing anything interesting or important – he’s just hanging out, sitting on his throne. As we’ve discussed before, it’s a character portrait rather than anything to do with plot or action. The writers here aren’t wrestling over the minute continuities of place. They’re not tracing Eidolon from planet to planet, figuring out if it’s realistic for him to be on Grubble when he was just over on Bonk. The storytelling evokes the idea of the Emperor’s Children spread across the galaxy. The thousand mentioned in that extract are better understood as gesture and symbol, not deeply textured characters. And to be clear, that’s totally fine. None of this is a criticism: I don’t think we want to read about a thousand different Emperor’s Children and their various depraved activities. It wouldn’t be interesting. What is interesting is the narrative contrast between heavy, textured detail and this sort of hand-waving vagueness. It’s one hour fifty-six minutes until the labour gangs arrive, but what’s Rogal Dorn doing for the whole series? He’s, you know, defending Terra. He’s building up the walls or something. There’s a dissonance in the Heresy between an obsessive level of detail over unimportant things and then absolute disregard for some fairly major narrative details.

The Horus Heresy tries to balance an aesthetic of extreme detail against the freedom for their characters to move around in the background. They communicate scale through closeness, but they also get a lot of mileage by implying that their characters are incredibly busy somewhere just out of view. The Emperor’s Children rise up across a thousand worlds (and wow, they have been doing some naughty stuff). Rogal Dorn is organising the defence of Terra, and we’ll give you a couple snapshots, but for the most part you’ll just have to believe us: it’s very complicated and he’s super clever. On balance, I think, the series leans more towards hand-waving. They don’t love committing themselves unless they have to. The number of Word Bearers, then, is unusual. It locks the narrative in on this very specific detail. It’s not just ‘lots’ or ‘untold hordes’: it’s a guaranteed, specific number. It binds the narrative in a way that doesn’t happen very often. In book #5, for instance, at the Drop Site Massacre (ch 24), we’re told that the Iron Warriors transports “disgorged thousands of warriors”, or that “tens of thousands” poured onto Isstvan V. They’re very coy about these numbers. Hard figures are few and far between. There’s the Word Bearers in ‘Aurelian’, and at the start of book #18, Deliverance Lost, we’re told that the Raven Guard lost over seventy-five thousand at the Drop Site Massacre (ch 1). I’m not sure many other examples exist. And again, while it’s not bad, it is sort of weird to read sixty-something books and never really know how many dudes are running around. It doesn’t undermine the theme of scope, but it’s certainly woollier than I would have expected.