Chris Wraight > Quotes

“So I fight for a Father who I never loved, against a brother that I did. I defend an empire that never wanted me against an army that would have taken me in a heartbeat.”
― Chris Wraight, The Path of Heaven

“You brothers-such a nest of rivalries. I warned him to make you sisters, that it would make things more civilized. He thought I was joking, I wasn't." - Malcador”
― Chris Wraight, Scars: Episode II

“The gods demand entertainment. They demand trial and contest. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at each other's throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe's end”
― Chris Wraight

“I heard from a contact on Mars, Jaghatai, that you do strange things to your ships." The Khan shot him a heavy-lidded stare. "I heard from a contact that you do strange things to your warriors.”
― Chris Wraight, Scars

“Now he does not care. Mostly, this lassitude appals him. He cannot understand why he no longer cares. But, deep down, buried where his old heart once beat, there is something else. Something infinitely shameful, so that he does not think of it often and pretends that it is just another part of his sickness, but it is there all the same – relief. He no longer has to make the effort, and that is a pleasure in itself. It is like falling asleep, or sinking into a warm pool of water. He lets it all slide, all degrade. He can feel his muscles atrophy and does not intervene. He can feel his bowels swell with inflammation, and it matters not. This is a kind of release. This is like a fist, clenched for a lifetime, slowly relaxing.”
― Chris Wraight, The Lords of Silence

“The lion snorted. 'You treat all as a game. That is why they sent for me - Malcador cannot trust you. No one can trust you. Your Legion is a rabble that would brawl among themselves if you were not there to smack their heads together.' 'If only they were more like yours,' said Russ, mockingly. 'Yes,' replied the Lion, exasperated. 'Yes. Is that so hard to imagine?'

Russ loosened his arms, letting Krakenmaw swing lazily before him. 'I know why you do this. I know why you conquer, world after world, driving your sons after every campaign Malcador finds for you. But our father won't do it, brother. He won't choose a favourite. And if He did, it wouldn't be you - it would be Sanguinius, or Rogal, or Horus. So you're wasting yourself, trying to be noticed. It doesn't work like that.'

The Lion let slip a scornful laugh. 'Not all of us are so without friends in the Palace, Leman, and you have no idea who our father favours.”
― Chris Wraight, Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

“This war has created monsters, and not all are in the camps of the enemy.”
― Chris Wraight, The Regent's Shadow

“Always, always, push towards the light.”
― Chris Wraight

“These things were in the past now, many long years ago, though the memory remained as solid and present as his heartbeats. Time's passage had made the events seem almost crazed, hyper-real, stretched across a surreal dreamscape that felt more like a skjald's embellished saga than the intact past. Perhaps it had not happened like that. Perhaps the Lion had taken his Stormbirds to the Tyrant's fortress, and he himself had teleported in. Perhaps it had not been Ogvai there, but Gunn, or someone else. Had Bjorn been there too? It was a long time ago, so doubtful, but Bjorn seemed to always have been there, right from the start, just waiting for his time to come to maturity.”
― Chris Wraight, Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

“And he felt it.
Rogal Dorn had been feeling it for days, weeks, building up, up, up, rising over him like a black fog, dragging at his limbs, clogging his mind, making him question every decision he made, every order he gave.
He hadn’t had any respite at all, of any kind, for three months. Three months! His sharpness was going now, his reactions were slower. A billion functionaries depending on him for everything, reaching out to him, suffocating him with their endless demands, pleas for help, for guidance. A billion eyes, on him, all the time.
And he’d fought, too. He’d fought. He’d fought primarchs, brothers he’d once thought of as equals or betters. He’d seen the hatred in Perturabo’s eyes, the mania in Fulgrim’s, stabbing at him, poisoning him. Every duel, every brief foray into combat, had chipped a bit more off, had weakened the foundations a little further. Fulgrim had been the worst. His brother’s old form, so pleasing to the eye, had gone, replaced by bodily corruption so deep he scarcely had the words for it. That degradation repulsed him almost more than anything else. It showed just how far you could fall, if you lost your footing in reality completely.
You couldn’t show that repulsion. You couldn’t betray the doubt, or give away the fatigue. You couldn’t give away so much as a flicker of weakness, or the game was up, so Dorn’s face remained just as it always had been – static, flinty, curt. He kept his shoulders back, spine straight. He hid the fevers that raged behind his eyes, the bone-deep weariness that throbbed through every muscle, all for show, all to give those who looked up to him something to cling on to, to believe in. The Emperor, his father, was gone, silent, locked in His own unimaginable agonies, and so everything else had crashed onto his shoulders. The weight of the entire species, all their frailties and imperfections, wrapped tight around his mouth and throat and nostrils, choking him, drowning him, making him want to cry out loud, to cower away from it, something he would never do, could never do, and so he remained where he was, caught between the infinite weight of Horus’ malice and the infinite demands of the Emperor’s will, and it would break him, he knew, break him open like the walls themselves, which were about to break now too, despite all he had done, but had it been enough, yes it had, no it could not have been, they would break, they must not break…
He clenched his fist, curling the fingers up tight. His mind was racing again. He was on the edge, slipping into a fugue state, the paralysis he dreaded. It came from within. It came from without. Something – something – was making the entire structure around him panic, weaken, fail in resolve. He was not immune. He was the pinnacle – when the base was corrupted, he, too, eventually, would shatter.”
― Chris Wraight, Warhawk

“Knowledge is no crime."
"In itself, no. But what is done with it, that can be.”
― Chris Wraight, Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

“The traveller is the one who takes his truth with him into strange lands. The moment he forgets his truth, he ceases to be a traveller, and becomes the strange land.”
― Chris Wraight, Warhawk

“Life is dangerous, sergeant. That is how we like it.”
― Chris Wraight, The Carrion Throne

“We are all damaged now,’ said Arvida, watching the approach. ‘All but you.’ Yesugei sat back against the curve of the hull. ‘No living thing is undamaged.’ ‘Yet you still smile. You still believe.’ ‘So do the rest. They need to remember, that is all. For now, all they see is slow defeat. They forget they have been... magnificent. They fight alone when all others are lost or manning walls far away. They come at enemy out of the glare of the sun. They have made him halt, turn back, come after us. They have forsaken the world they loved, have let it pass into ruin, all for this.’ Yesugei thought of Qin Xa then, from whom there had never been a murmur of unbelief. ‘They will remember, before the end. Other Legions have failed this test – they let their souls change.”
― Chris Wraight, The Path of Heaven

“Forgive,’ he says, speaking softly to the Little Lord at his elbow. The tiny daemon giggles, then farts liquidly into the crook of his armour. That counts as forgiveness, probably.”
― Chris Wraight, The Lords of Silence

“Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void.

'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.'

It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.'

Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep.

But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck.

For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite.

It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed.

'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.”
― Chris Wraight, Warhawk

“I lived, captain-general. It was short, and it was painful, but by the nine hells, I lived. I'd rather have it that way than yours - no joy, no hate, no fear. Unbreakable without growth, immortal without passion."

- Primarch Ushotan”
― Chris Wraight, Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

“Faith was cheap, for the desperate. It was only valuable for those with the strength to understand its purpose.”
― Chris Wraight

“So it all means nothing to you?’ I asked, part-intrigued, part-irritated. ‘All of this struggle to improve, to better the structures we find ourselves in?’ ‘It means everything. If we ever cease, we die. The fact that we cannot succeed is irrelevant.”
― Chris Wraight, The Regent's Shadow

“Like all his Legion, he enters combat in silence, letting his work speak for him. To invoke another, even the primarch, would be to admit weakness, a lack of self-sufficiency, to open the suspicion that there is luck or favour involved in these things.”
― Chris Wraight, The Lords of Silence

“They say he is elusive,' he said. 'You will hear that a lot. But listen: he is not elusive; he is at the centre. Wherever he is, that is the centre. He will seem to have broken the circle, drifted to the edge, right until the end, and then you will see that the world has come to him, and he has been waiting for it all along.”
― Chris Wraight, Brotherhood of the Storm

“This is a vindication of their esoteric creed, of the belief that through entropy comes apotheosis, of the wholehearted embrace of mortality in all its truest and most honest aspects.”
― Chris Wraight, The Lords of Silence

“There is nowhere left to hide. We know you now. We shall hunt you in every plane of reality. We will cleanse the void, then we will cleanse the warp. So look on me now, yaksha, and know your slayer.”
― Chris Wraight, The Path of Heaven

“I have come to believe,’ the chancellor said, ‘that in failure often lies our best sign of truth. I failed in the Council, and only now see that I was cleaving to a doomed course. The harder I pushed, the more I was resisted. I couldn’t cross the threshold. I should have taken that, I think, as a sign to examine my instincts.”
― Chris Wraight, The Emperor's Legion

“Perhaps I was fated to make the choice I did. I dislike the idea of fate, though. I dislike the idea that the things we do are ordained for us by higher powers; that our actions are like shadow-plays performed for their amusement. Most of all, I dislike the idea that the future is set, running away from us in clear lines that we are compelled to follow, with only the illusion of a sovereign will to comfort us on the journey. Nothing I have learned since my ascension has convinced me that I am wrong to think those things. I have learned of the deep metaphysics of the universe, and the long, tired games of the immortals, but I retain faith in our ability to choose. We are the authors of our actions. When the test comes, we can go in either direction: we can triumph, or we can fail, and the universe cares not which.”
― Chris Wraight, Brotherhood of the Storm

“Revus heard someone shouting, roaring, screaming – and only slowly realised it was him.”
― Chris Wraight, The Hollow Mountain

“Carthago delenda est.
How many humans would know what those words meant? How many Terrans, whose world had birthed them, and how many on the thousands of newly populated and rediscovered orbs, all frantically developing and building and reaching upwards to a dimly understood but fantastically powerful future? Just a handful, maybe, who had access to lost books written in dead languages. History had a penchant for repeating itself, though, for rehearsing old patterns in ever grander circuits even if the participants had forgotten their origins.”
― Chris Wraight, Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris

“There are two great errors,' a long-dead sage of Kai had written in scrolls still preserved in Khum Karta. 'First, to pretend that the path of heaven does not exist, second, to follow it”
― Chris Wraight, Scars

“And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.”
― Chris Wraight, Warhawk

“I suppose I don’t know why she kept you on,’ John said eventually. ‘I mean, if she hated all of this so much. Aren’t you just… the worst kind of reminder?’ Leetu chewed steadily. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe that was a problem for her.’ He never really smiled. His bull-necked, slab-muscled head was always held perfectly poised, almost expressionlessly. ‘Or maybe she liked to remember a beginning. From when things were more optimistic.’ John raised an eyebrow. ‘But, if you believe her, she was the one behind it all. No Erda, no traitors. Everyone raised properly in father’s secure Palace, given the guidance they always needed.’ ‘What makes you think that would have gone better?’ ‘Is there a worse outcome than this one?’ ‘I would say so. There usually is.”
― Chris Wraight, Warhawk