"Architect of Fate"

Architect of Fate (Edited by Christian Dunn)

Remember when I said after the last W40K book that I was "almost out"? Well, after this one, I'm out, I promise. This is another book in the SPACE MARINES BATTLES series, and it's a short story collection. I'm just gonna run them down real fast:

Accursed Eternity: This is pretty good; it details a group of Space Marines having a Battle wherein they board a ghost ship that appears and disappears, attempting to destroy the demon within (the giant blue bird pictured on the front cover). I liked the approach the author took to the demon ship, where it starts out as a pristine, if empty, starship and only morphs into a rusted metallic blood-oozing hellscape because that's what our heroes start imagining. Very entertaining, if slightly confusing.

Sanctus: I'm not too crazy about this one, which is about a bunch of relic-hunting space marines battling Chaos space marines and cultists and a weird prophet dude who is trying to set up a stable time loop by turning the Chaos space marines into statues using a dust storm made up of loyalist prayers and meanwhile up on a ship there's an Inquisitor guy and a demon gets lose after a navigator baron's son blows up a bomb in his boot while they're trying to torture him and then the Grey Knights have to fight the demon so that the inquisitor has enough time to start bombing the planet. (deep breath) I think the author tried to pack a little too much in this one.

Endeavor of Will: I liked this one. A Iron Warriors bad guy attacks two star forts guarding the Eye of Terror, and who shows up but the main charecter from Maldorax? I didn't realize that the giant hammer he uses called the "Fist of Dorn" has the part you hit someone with actually shaped like a fist, which I guess makes sense since he's a member of the Imperial Fists, but all I could think of was a gag weapon you'd use in a jrpg.

Fateweaver: This one was better than Sanctus, but I wasn't really a big fan of it. I will give it credit for wrapping up all the loose plot threads (no easy task!) and nailing the ending, a distressingly rare feat in W40k.

I guess that was "real fast" after all. Well, let me sum up quickly: It's a little confusing, but there's a lot of good action in here, hung on a frame that all comes together in a pleasing way at the end. It's stuck firmly in good-not-great territory, but it's easily worth the $9.