Fel Zarhost, one time Chief Librarian/ Drean of the Night Lords is having a bad day. Honestly, it's been a difficult life, as the legionary with the bolter to his head is about to find out.

Told through Zarhost's fractured, and honestly rather confusing, memories, forced into the mind of his unknown assailant, including memories of others he used to torture and punish another (because fuck you, memories, dreams, trauma, and psyker powers are wild!), Child of Night is the nightmare This Is Your Life of the former Chief Librarian. We see a moment of being hunted in his youth, lowing a friend and the unleashing of his power - could this have been a Thunder Warrior or Techno-Barbarian? Black Library, never change with your wondrous subtlety - his friend was called Calliope (can I be honest? I genuinely thought this was taking place in the Warp for a minute and imagined Calliope as one of the Davinite priests Erebus and Lorgar love so much), a real Event Horizon nightmare showing the VIII Legion were horrifying long before the Heresy, and most importantly, that time he and Sevatar had a tête-à-tête and he was told ta-ta. Sadly, possibly because he was acting in Night Haunter's stead, Sev doesn't appear to have put on his sassy pants that day and is just a grumpy gus.

But wait, what colour is the ceramite of the legionary with the bolter...

I love a Horus Heresy story that isn't glorified bolter porn or perfunctory scenes and dialogue that feel like the line between dots, rather than their own story, and Child of Night is definitely doing more than that. The memories/ visions are appropriately strange and haunting emulating the feeling of disorientation having having a veritable turducken of memories jammed in your brain. They confusion can definitely be distracting, but it is effective and the Event Horizon/ Hellraiser memories are both the most perplexing and effective in how horrifying they are. We get a look at Zarhost's life and the physical and other devisions of the Terran and Nostromon Night Lords, as well as a look at how they have always been a horrible legion, even by galaxy conquering human supremacist fascist empires go...but not all of them felt great about all the torture.

I would like to see more about the Night Lords, their Librarius, Nikea, and the aftermath, especially with the lightning bolters being one of the legions/ chaos space marines who eschew psykers, which seems especially odd for an essentially agnostic Undivided group who simply adore psychological warfare and inducing terror. Nevertheless, the brief glimpses of the argument with Sevatar and its revelations about the legion is interesting, even if I need more.

This definitely isn't absolute top tier Heresy goodness, but it's definitely up there. More than worth reading for anyone, especially fans of the VIII legion, but also not really necessary reading in the grand scheme of the Horus Heresy.

What can I say? Outcasts from the traitor legions are my precious babies babies. ( )