The recall of the Fists

[dmcq]

Hi all

Something has been bugging me since the start of the Horus Heresy series......why did the emperor recall the Imperial Fists to Terra so soon after Horus became the Warmaster? It took several years for the fists to actually return home (flight of the Eisenstein) and when they did no work had been done to the palace.

Did the Emperor know that schism was going to happen? If so why did he allow Horus to take command?? If he wanted the palace fortified surely while waiting for Dorn and the fists Malcador and the Emperor could have started the work???

Very strange me thinks

[ElectricPaladin]

I recall that the Emperor had known that the Imperial Webway project might involve monsters trying to invade the material world, and he wanted an army on hand just in case.

[Bob821]

You have to remember how organic the 40k universe is. Way back in 80's the foundations where layed down and been built on ever since. There are thousands of examples of strangeness like this in 40k.

The HH books where as far as I know also never planned. They are just growing and as such just like 40k in general there are plot, story and time line oddities.

To answer your question I always felt the big E planned it all from the start. He understood that an Empire has to be at war to exist. As soon as it's not it stagnates and is then slowly pulled apart. So he layed the foundations. Two camps of brothers. The war was planned. As I see it big E was trying to destroy chaos with the goldern throne. With Choas destroyed Sanguiness would have had the strength to slay Horus. The key as I see it is the brothers had to fight each other with out his interference. If he had got involved the loyalists would have wiped out the rebels and no eternal conflict would have existed. The problem was Choas was not destryed because that numb skull Magnus damaged the goldern throne. Hence big E had to jump in at the end to ***** slap Horus. So... the reason big E and Malcador did not start the fortification of the palace was Dorn needed to do the work because if they did it the defences would have been too good!.... Maybe.

[YorkNecromancer]

It's also worth remembering that military leaders are hardly infallible - the Charge of The Light Brigade anyone?

The fact The Emperor is prescient only adds to that rather than detracts - predestination paradoxes being what they are.

[ElectricPaladin]

Didn't the Eldar say that Big E was a lousy seer?

[YorkNecromancer]

No idea. It's certainly the sort of thing they would say. And honestly - if The Emperor was so good at predicting the future, how come he lost the Primarchs? How come the Heresy happened at all?

The bottom line with The Emperor: a lot of what they say about him is pure propaganda. He was a powerful psyker, for sure, but with great power comes great hubris, which is kind of the theme of the Imperium, really. A man with vision and power comes along, says 'I'm going to use this power to create the perfect utopian society and save everyone' and is just dumb enough to believe his own hype. Really, in the overall narrative of 40K, the history of humanity in general and the Imperium in specific is one of catastrophic failure. It's a 'Tragedy-with-a-capital-T' Tragedy after all

The thing about that last line: am I talking about The Emperor or Horus? Because, to steal a line from Mike Carey, Horus may be the Prince of Lies, but in that, as in all things, he learned from his father.

A hideous military miscalculation certainly fits from a thematic point of view; two men convinced of their own godlike greatness manage to convince others to believe in them, but their flawed actions reveal them for the imperfect men they actually are.

[Blood Shadow]

I seem to remember something from way back that suggested the Emperor made a pact with the chaos gods to allow him exactly half of his sons, with them taking the other half.

My theory is that this pact was conditional, one of the conditions being he didn't ask to be worshiped as a god and hence his aversion to it.

It may be that chaos hid the possible futures surrounding Horus, or like the Eldar he may have foreseen Horus winning but ultimately destroying chaos.....regardless whatever his plan was, Magnus destroyed it.

I still wonder if the surviving loyalist primarchs interred the Emperor in the golden throne, to stop him reanimating as a kind of banishment for deceiving everyone...

In fact if the Emperor had made a pact, then perhaps this is why he never told any of the Primarchs about the true nature of the warp......he wanted to see which ones would turn bad and then eliminate them one by one with the Wolves of Fenris. We know he eliminated 2 primarchs before M30k, my guess is they the first to show signs of taint, then Magnus, then a warning to Lorgar, though I suspect Horus was different I think he was never supposed to turn......as this was Erebus' doing and not the Warp dieties. So if 9 turned +2 then one rebel/traitor wasn't supposed to be......(so 11 turned instead of half being 10, counting Alpharius as 1).

I also wonder if Lorgar was the one who was not supposed to turn, Malcador said something along these lines.

[AirHorse]

The Imperial Fists were acting as the Emperor's Praetorians during the Great Crusade and accompanied him where he went. It makes sense that he also took them with him to Terra when he went, especially as he was developing a secret project to access the webway, large parts of which are infested with Daemons after the fall.

Also Rogal Dorn was tasked to build the Imperial Palace at first wasn't he? It was only when Horus' Betrayal came out that it had to become more of an Imperial Fortress!

[AlexGB]

Bear in mind that the Emperor was blind to his own destiny and events surrounding the Heresy were clouded to him, also he couldn't foretell the fates of his Primarchs as they were constructed from his own DNA and thus also invisible to his minds eye.

[Katharon]

There is also such a thing as a "strategic reserve". The Imperial Fists could have operated as this for the Crusade as a whole, but only to be unleashed at the Emperor's command and not at the Warmaster's. Otherwise I am sure that Horus would have tried to find a nice empty, lonely part of the galaxy to dump them in when things went heretical.

[YorkNecromancer]

http://www.headlesshollow.com/images/2005/horusbox.gif

It has to be said, the way they played in the original '93 Horus Heresy boardgame would bear that out - if you were the Imperial player, if you basically turtled with the Fists, Rogal Dorn, and the Custodes, the Imperial Palace was literally next to impossible to assault, no matter what army you brought. There's a reason the smart Chaos player always went for the star ports.

[Lord Asterion]

With the Emperor on Terra, working on his secret project, he was wise to have thought to bring the Imperial Fists with him, if the Chaos gods found out what he had planned, establishing human use of the webway which would render humans much more difficult to corrupt as humans wouldn't need pskyers anymore so they could annihilate that part of the species and render themselves near incorruptible.

Chaos were never going to let that stand so he had to be prepared, the fact he never imagined even one, let alone nine, of his sons would be corrupted and that was were the attack would come from, was his failing there.