Authors' Words by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

Cadian Blood Limited Edition

For once, I’m going to keep one of these self-conscious author forwards short (lucky you!) but at the same time we really should address the gigantic elephant in the room. It’s something you’ll pick up on pretty swiftly as you start the novel, and if you’ve read Cadian Blood before, I’m willing to bet you know what I’m about to say.

Unbroken.

It’s how the Cadians describe themselves, how they describe the planet Cadia itself. Cadia is the world at the Gates of Hell, standing resolute against the worst depredations (and, indeed, invasions) of Chaos for ten thousand years.

At least... it was.

The setting’s metaplot has changed in the years since Cadian Blood was published. While things are still set at the end of M41 that chaotic span of time known as the Dark Millennium, where Warhammer 40.000 lives forever at two minutes to midnight - the actual events that make up the closing years of M41 have changed and grown. A particularly major and relevant shift is that maybe the one word you can't use to describe Cadia anymore is ‘unbroken’.

Cadia’s not quite rubble in the void, but it’s not exactly in the flush of health. It’s lifeless rock populated by daemons, having suffered the indignity of humanity’s fallen angels deciding they were sick of having to fight past it each time they sailed from the Eye of Terror. Abaddon the Despoiler turned the second-strongest Imperial world to dust and slag, and, well... the rest is future history.

Obviously, there’s a lot of pathos for the Cadians (and thankfully for novelists and readers) in this. Cadians still refer to themselves as the unbroken - after all, they didn’t break. It’s a reference to the world they lost, the one planet in the Imperium apart from Terra that no one believed could ever break. I love the pathos, the sheer defiance of it, but I’d be lying if I said the irony doesn’t make me grin. After all, this novel was written when the idea of Cadia breaking was as alien to Warhammer fans as it was to the Cadians themselves.

The lore about the Cadian Shock Troops, especially a decade or so ago, enshrined them as the ‘best’ of the Guard. I put ‘best’ in quotation marks because while preferences are subjective (I’m especially fond of the Tallarn Desert Raiders and the Harakoni Warhawks, if you put a gun to my head and made me choose a fave) the Cadians were said to be the most disciplined, trained to the highest standards, living on perhaps the most militarised planet in the Imperium. Obviously, they had to be this way: their world was literally on the edge of being swallowed by the Eye of Terror. They held the Cadian Gate, where the forces of the Archenemy emerged into realspace for ten millennia. You’ll see this excellence of reputation and training not only in Cadian Blood, but also in Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn series, and any relevant Imperial Guard sources published around then, too.

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