‘Cypher: Lord of the Fallen’ – John French (Black Library)

Page Count: 179 Pages

As the Great Rift unfolds in the night sky above Terra and daemons walk upon the birth world of mankind, the Primarch Roboute Guilliman returns, heralding a dark new age.

During the breaking storm, Cypher and his band of Fallen escape from the most secure prison in the Imperium. Now loose in the Imperial Palace, they are hunted by warriors of the Dark Angels, forces of the Adeptus Custodes, and Imperial Assassins. But what are Cypher’s intentions? Can anything or anyone be trusted?

Told from Cypher’s own, unreliable point of view, this tale of truth, lies and secrets sees one of the Imperium’s most mysterious figures make war at its very heart. But what are the true motivations of the Lord of the Fallen?

The whole point of the Warhammer 40K setting, at least from where I’m sat, is that nothing changes. On the one level, it can’t because if it does, Games Workshop suddenly has no product to sell ;o) My cynicism to one side though… The Imperium has stagnated, over ten thousand years, to a point where not even a literal son of the Emperor can bring it back to what it was. And the rest of the galaxy? Well, that is being constantly torn up, and torn up again, by various factions warring for control. The narrative may move forward, and does, but the status quo cannot move at all. No one side can take advantage, all anyone can do is hold on.

And that really interests me because tales of heroism, and bleak despair, to one side, how do you make a Warhammer 40K tale fresh and interesting when its direction is really limited? How do you surprise a reader when the writer is under strict instructions to leave the wider setting pretty much as they found it? Well, the good news is that it’s a huge setting with scope for those tales to be told well. One approach is to take original characters and throw them into it (doesn’t matter if they die) but John French goes for a tougher challenge, taking possibly the most enigmatic character in the setting and throwing him at the one objective that he must never complete (can never complete). That’s a tall order but French more than pulls it off.

The whole point of Cypher is to throw him at his objective and see how close you can get him to it… without actually reaching it (it’s that question of status quo again) French gets Cypher closer than he has perhaps ever been and even though you just know how it has to end, the amount of tension that you feel reading it makes for a really intense experience that I couldn’t help but be carried along by. French knows that if you’re not allowed to reach the destination, you make the journey as memorable as you possibly can and that’s exactly what he does here. You have three separate factions lined up against Cypher, four if you count Cyphers own warband (at least a couple of them want him dead, albeit for different reasons) and you get to see the resulting explosions play out against a crumbling Emperor’s palace so big that it makes Gormenghast look like a bungalow. It’s great fun and wouldn’t look out of place, at all, as one of those Warhammer+ animated episodes.

Not only that, you get a rare peek inside the mind of Cypher himself. Well, the bits of it that he will let you see, maybe… Again, you’re never going to find out the whole story but that’s not the point, you were never meant to. The fun is in trying to figure it out anyway, even though Cypher tells us it’s a fools game.

You will end up with more questions than you had, to start off with, but that is the whole point of Cypher so I’d say that French’s work hits all the targets that it aims for. I certainly had a lot of fun reading it. And you know what? Deep down, I know that Cypher will never make it to the Throne but if his next attempt makes it into a book, I’d still read it :o)