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The Dark Coil
Cold Covenant
A Warhammer 40,000 Novel
An Astra Militarum regiment has been reassigned after a draining war on an icy, joyless planet. Their morale is low, and they lack the zeal expected of Humanity's defenders. A handful of them hatch a plan to go it alone when they find out they're being sent to a death world. They have no idea what they're setting in motion.
READ IT BECAUSE
It's a fascinating look at a regiment that's not famous or particularly heroic, and what conditions they're expected to endure. You'll see the pressure they're under, what makes them crack, and ultimately discover the fate of those who turn from the God-Emperor.
THE STORY
Bad blood after good, with honour, for honour lost.
The 27th Halgarth Brine Dogs will never be remembered among the finest of the Astra Militarum. While countless regiments serve the God-Emperor with valour and pride, the Brine Dogs fight because they must, with little faith or fire. After months stationed on Oblazt, a remote planet ruled by a corrupt aristocracy, they are finally due to depart for a new war zone. Few are eager to go. Four will defy their fate.
Discovering their regiment is bound for a death world, three veterans and an enigmatic enginseer conspire to desert. They will seed a spiral of tragedy and terror that will cast a long shadow, for Oblazt harbours a primal darkness drawn to sin. On this frozen world, wickedness never fades, and ghosts will not be silenced.
Written by Peter Fehervari.
An Astra Militarum regiment has been reassigned after a draining war on an icy, joyless planet. Their morale is low, and they lack the zeal expected of Humanity's defenders. A handful of them hatch a plan to go it alone when they find out they're being sent to a death world. They have no idea what they're setting in motion.
READ IT BECAUSE
It's a fascinating look at a regiment that's not famous or particularly heroic, and what conditions they're expected to endure. You'll see the pressure they're under, what makes them crack, and ultimately discover the fate of those who turn from the God-Emperor.
THE STORY
Bad blood after good, with honour, for honour lost.
The 27th Halgarth Brine Dogs will never be remembered among the finest of the Astra Militarum. While countless regiments serve the God-Emperor with valour and pride, the Brine Dogs fight because they must, with little faith or fire. After months stationed on Oblazt, a remote planet ruled by a corrupt aristocracy, they are finally due to depart for a new war zone. Few are eager to go. Four will defy their fate.
Discovering their regiment is bound for a death world, three veterans and an enigmatic enginseer conspire to desert. They will seed a spiral of tragedy and terror that will cast a long shadow, for Oblazt harbours a primal darkness drawn to sin. On this frozen world, wickedness never fades, and ghosts will not be silenced.
Written by Peter Fehervari.
- Genres40k
372 pages, Hardcover
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 19, 2026
Peter Fehervari, as ever, delivers a richly textured and unsettling mystery. A woman who yearns to be a poet but is addicted to killing, a wide-eyed revolutionary whose ideals are gradually eroded by hubris and compromise; a priest afflicted by a deadly illness, and a murderous vagabond. Each is haunted by guilt, burdened by the past, and drawn into a story that is as much about their inner torment as the mysteries surrounding them.
Cold Covenant is perhaps the most immediately intelligible entry in the Dark Coil, though that is by no means a criticism. Fehervari deftly weaves together disparate timelines, deepening the mystery rather than diminishing it. And while there are plenty of Easter eggs for those familiar with his wider work, the novel stands wonderfully on its own as a self-contained story.
Fehervari remains, by some margin, the finest writer in the Black Library, and Cold Covenant might just be his best work yet. Do give it a read!
Cold Covenant is perhaps the most immediately intelligible entry in the Dark Coil, though that is by no means a criticism. Fehervari deftly weaves together disparate timelines, deepening the mystery rather than diminishing it. And while there are plenty of Easter eggs for those familiar with his wider work, the novel stands wonderfully on its own as a self-contained story.
Fehervari remains, by some margin, the finest writer in the Black Library, and Cold Covenant might just be his best work yet. Do give it a read!
October 22, 2026
Feels surprisingly 'clean' for a Fehervari book, in that I had a reasonably good idea who was where and what was going on, and when, which is not always the case
low toyetic descriptions (has Fehervari been given 'a pass' on this?).
watching souls dissolve in a solution of unnamed gods.
the readers know a lot more about the spiritual reality of their cosmos than the characters, so for us its more of a detective of bird spotting story in which we watch the attention and tendencies of various chaos powers drift through and round the psyche and behaviours of the various characters
the soft radiation of decay permeates everything and the smallest thought or prick of curiosity can gently hook a soul and lead it spiralling to strange locations
inversely, while there are lots and lots of fanatic in all the Dark Coil stories, the power of fanaticism is less spiritually clear in Cold Covenant, (and really what can I say about this that is not true of almost all the Dark Coil?) - few people are ever entirely spiritually 'clean' but the power of the Emperor, who in the Coil is just another power, not its antithesis, is always there, intermixed and flowing into, though opposing, all the others
the question of 'do you ever really have a choice'? is (like 'Judgement Night') central to these stories and occupies a fracture point between the material action of the book and its themes and characters
In the world of the Dark Coil, and with most of its characters, most of the time, there is a general sense that no real choices are made, that people might think they did, or feel they did, but at least when looking back, they think, say or feel that everything was inevitable. Strangely, some of the most accepting and 'fate bound' characters seem to have the greatest ability to arrange their own lives and fates to their own desire, perhaps simply because they are less deluded. In 'Cold Covenant', Mishcha, the scout, is probably the least deluded person there, and comes closest to 'managing' or not completely spiralling into darkness, while Rhezov, the worldling radical with the plan, who, from an outside perspective, would probably be considered the protagonist or hero, is maybe the most powerless, deluded, ignorant and scheme-enmeshed character there.
Yet the chaos gods, and indeed, readers, require that there are actually choices and that those choices matter. From a divine perspective you can't very easily hop about cackling 'ha ha ha you have damned yourself to chaos' if the people in question didn't actually really damn themselves. If they genuinely had no choice, and everything was really inevitable, then there is no power to their failure and no victory for chaos. We as readers of a story are the same way, we need to feel enmeshed in something, a complex, interesting flow of events where what people say, think and do, matters, at least in part because they could have possibly done other things.
So there is a necessary paradox between the causal radiation of these stories, in which it feels like everything is fretting and coming apart and spiralling downwards and where there was perhaps no other way, and the lucent moment of the story as experienced by both the characters and us, where things are constantly happening in a tight knot of immediate circumstance.
Sometimes I wonder what the Dark Coil characters look like to other people in the setting and is usually a funny thought. So many Fehervari characters and worlds are just sinking in this effervescent umbral gloom but at times it seems like this mysterious weirdness just sticks to certain groups and people and that everyone else is just wandering around being normal while these freaks melt in a corner. It feels a little like being part of a group of heavy drug users who flow through society following their own patterns of drama and odd quests, seeing their own symbols, in the scene but not of it.
Or just; everything is so relentlessly chaosed-up that its almost ridiculous. Bro there is chaos everywhere can the Inquisition please do its job. Oblazt has weird chaos theatres, mad sorceress nobles, a giant blue god eye that stares through the ice, khornate fighting pits, an extremely Heretek servitor factory, arguably slightly chaosy domestriders, nurgle fish holes, bro I am calling the Inquisition but no-one is picking up bro.
This is a nice, solid, relatively clear and coherent Fehervari that isn't meaningfully scary; all happens as if in a dream and, more; most of the wiser characters know they are in a trap of fate and proceed with this awareness so things have the tenor of a tragic working out rather than a scary slasher hunt. An actual, (or several), full horror movie happens in the background of this story, with the survivors of a shuttle crash being hunted through its depths by a mad revenant, but this is not the main story. Likewise there is a Dostoyevskiaan story about a flawed radical caught between the interests of two dangerous, powerful women while trying to fulfil his ideals, but that is also not the main story and not the real story.
low toyetic descriptions (has Fehervari been given 'a pass' on this?).
watching souls dissolve in a solution of unnamed gods.
the readers know a lot more about the spiritual reality of their cosmos than the characters, so for us its more of a detective of bird spotting story in which we watch the attention and tendencies of various chaos powers drift through and round the psyche and behaviours of the various characters
the soft radiation of decay permeates everything and the smallest thought or prick of curiosity can gently hook a soul and lead it spiralling to strange locations
inversely, while there are lots and lots of fanatic in all the Dark Coil stories, the power of fanaticism is less spiritually clear in Cold Covenant, (and really what can I say about this that is not true of almost all the Dark Coil?) - few people are ever entirely spiritually 'clean' but the power of the Emperor, who in the Coil is just another power, not its antithesis, is always there, intermixed and flowing into, though opposing, all the others
the question of 'do you ever really have a choice'? is (like 'Judgement Night') central to these stories and occupies a fracture point between the material action of the book and its themes and characters
In the world of the Dark Coil, and with most of its characters, most of the time, there is a general sense that no real choices are made, that people might think they did, or feel they did, but at least when looking back, they think, say or feel that everything was inevitable. Strangely, some of the most accepting and 'fate bound' characters seem to have the greatest ability to arrange their own lives and fates to their own desire, perhaps simply because they are less deluded. In 'Cold Covenant', Mishcha, the scout, is probably the least deluded person there, and comes closest to 'managing' or not completely spiralling into darkness, while Rhezov, the worldling radical with the plan, who, from an outside perspective, would probably be considered the protagonist or hero, is maybe the most powerless, deluded, ignorant and scheme-enmeshed character there.
Yet the chaos gods, and indeed, readers, require that there are actually choices and that those choices matter. From a divine perspective you can't very easily hop about cackling 'ha ha ha you have damned yourself to chaos' if the people in question didn't actually really damn themselves. If they genuinely had no choice, and everything was really inevitable, then there is no power to their failure and no victory for chaos. We as readers of a story are the same way, we need to feel enmeshed in something, a complex, interesting flow of events where what people say, think and do, matters, at least in part because they could have possibly done other things.
So there is a necessary paradox between the causal radiation of these stories, in which it feels like everything is fretting and coming apart and spiralling downwards and where there was perhaps no other way, and the lucent moment of the story as experienced by both the characters and us, where things are constantly happening in a tight knot of immediate circumstance.
Sometimes I wonder what the Dark Coil characters look like to other people in the setting and is usually a funny thought. So many Fehervari characters and worlds are just sinking in this effervescent umbral gloom but at times it seems like this mysterious weirdness just sticks to certain groups and people and that everyone else is just wandering around being normal while these freaks melt in a corner. It feels a little like being part of a group of heavy drug users who flow through society following their own patterns of drama and odd quests, seeing their own symbols, in the scene but not of it.
Or just; everything is so relentlessly chaosed-up that its almost ridiculous. Bro there is chaos everywhere can the Inquisition please do its job. Oblazt has weird chaos theatres, mad sorceress nobles, a giant blue god eye that stares through the ice, khornate fighting pits, an extremely Heretek servitor factory, arguably slightly chaosy domestriders, nurgle fish holes, bro I am calling the Inquisition but no-one is picking up bro.
This is a nice, solid, relatively clear and coherent Fehervari that isn't meaningfully scary; all happens as if in a dream and, more; most of the wiser characters know they are in a trap of fate and proceed with this awareness so things have the tenor of a tragic working out rather than a scary slasher hunt. An actual, (or several), full horror movie happens in the background of this story, with the survivors of a shuttle crash being hunted through its depths by a mad revenant, but this is not the main story. Likewise there is a Dostoyevskiaan story about a flawed radical caught between the interests of two dangerous, powerful women while trying to fulfil his ideals, but that is also not the main story and not the real story.
October 17, 2026
[as with all new books, spoiler free!]
first and foremost, welcome back mr. fehervari!!!! my god did i miss you.
as always with ALL (i genuinely mean all) fehervari books - i am utterly speechless. his talent is beyond words.
i’ll never forget when this ‘dark coil’ universe swept me away, and i’ve embraced it with open arms ever since.
i don’t really know how to put this review into words. it goes beyond that. to even call this ‘a book’ feels like a sin (though certain characters will take that as a compliment 😉). this book is an experience. a beautifully horrific journey.
again, i wish i could define my love for this (and all dark coil books) better.
all i have to say. stop what you’re doing. read this. NOW. and start reading it again.
peter fehervari is the greatest 40k author, and it’s not even close.
so it goes.
first and foremost, welcome back mr. fehervari!!!! my god did i miss you.
as always with ALL (i genuinely mean all) fehervari books - i am utterly speechless. his talent is beyond words.
i’ll never forget when this ‘dark coil’ universe swept me away, and i’ve embraced it with open arms ever since.
i don’t really know how to put this review into words. it goes beyond that. to even call this ‘a book’ feels like a sin (though certain characters will take that as a compliment 😉). this book is an experience. a beautifully horrific journey.
again, i wish i could define my love for this (and all dark coil books) better.
all i have to say. stop what you’re doing. read this. NOW. and start reading it again.
peter fehervari is the greatest 40k author, and it’s not even close.
so it goes.
October 21, 2026
Warhammer 40K is, or was, sometimes described as a setting, not a story. Some of the best books and series in the Black Library embrace that truth, with only tangential ties to the overarching narrative, such as there is. Fehervari’s Dark Coil, and this book especially, embrace this, using the grim darkness of the far future to tell a story that is all its own. Here, we have a Warhammer book that is almost without Warhammer. You’ll find no clash of armies in these pages, no burning of worlds. Instead, you have a gothic and cosmic horror story that, on its own, is a compelling read. More than perhaps any other Warhammer book I’ve read, you can go in with no prior knowledge of this universe and have a great time, with scenes that alternate between haunting and visceral, and a series of well-drawn flawed characters who run the gamut from contemptible to pitiable to heroic to even adorable (there is a character in here who is of a kind that is hard to pull off well in any novel, much less a Black Library one, who was nevertheless a joy to read). But if you are a Warhammer fan, or, even better, if you are a traveler along Peter Fehervari’s Dark Coil of novels, perhaps the most impressive set of works out of the Black Library in some time, the text becomes so much richer. Motifs and archetypes you have encountered before are reworked, reused, and recontextualized in ways that are a feast for the reader. Blood for the Wolf-Emperor, so it flows indeed. The prose work here is eminently satisfying too, in a way that easily frames the type of world you are entering, while constantly clueing you in that there is a wider world out there that you are only just seeing hints of. While it probably isn’t my *favorite* of the Fehervari books I’ve read, with Fire Caste still holding that crown, it is *easily* second best, with the most satisfying ending of the bunch. Check it out!
October 24, 2026
Finally, after six years of waiting, Peter Fehervari returns with another novel: Cold Covenant, the fifth novel in his story cycle The Dark Coil (and the 21st Coil-story in total). I have been a fan and a passionate explorer of this dark, poetic corner for the literary 40k-universe ever since reading Fehervari's debut novel Fire Caste over ten years ago, so needless to say I was excited to dive into this.
Fehervari's stories have always went against the grain of 40k literature: they are subtle instead of bombastic, slow burns instead of wild adventures; they dare to be confusing instead of straightforward, preferring non-linear structures and dream-like logic and expecting readers to go with the flow along with the characters. They reward multiple readings to pick up on references to other stories and recurring motifs, characters and places. That is not to say that this is a homework-heavy set of stories: don't be afraid to jump into The Coil at any point you like; it's not an ongoing series per se, but more a collection of (mostly) stand-alone (Horror-)stories that gravitate around a shared, mostly isolated corner of the 40k cosmos, like 40ks version of the Cthulhu- or Hastur-mythos.
Cold Covenant fits neatly into this pattern: It's set on a backwater planet under Imperial rule and it's cast of characters consist of comparative low-lives: a group of would-be-deserters of the Imperial Guard as well as a drifter who is looking for a way to escape her past, preferably off-planet. The stakes stay low and personal: this is not a battle for the fate of a planet, but a story about the consequences of choices and the personal struggles of a handful of characters. Terrible choices and struggling on the edge of damnation, yes, but still.
Genre-wise Cold Covenant is, like all of the Coil stories, first and foremost a horror-novel. As Fehervari writes in the "Afterwyrd" to the Special Edition of the book: "... it's a Warhammer *horror* story, regardless of the label, or lack of a formal one. Hopefully the blurb and cover art prepared you for that, though if you know my reputation, you'd expect nothing else. I've been writing horror from the start, even if my early stories were veiled as military SF." To get a bit more nuanced, I really loved that Cold Covenant reads like a cross between a western, a sailors myth and a ghost story. I got strong Civil War western vibes from the crew of deserters hatching and carrying out their plan to escape their regiment, and the story at large - an abandoned, sunk ship that yet contains treasures, with the faithless mutineers being inevitably drawn back towards their betrayal - reads almost like a yarn spun by a haggard seaman after a pint too much on a stormy night. Ghosts - the imagined and the real, of the past and the future (as if there were a difference in this world) - have always been a prominent feature of the Coil stories, and Fehervari makes this a core feature of the plot and the vibe of his latest novel.
The novel has a melancholic and apprehensive mood, and the story reads even slower than most of his other novels. Personally, if you excuse the worn metaphor, I enjoyed reading it like a fine wine, slowly digesting each chapter and letting it simmer before going over to the next section. The chapters are all titled in the 'The Noun' format - The Hunter, The Anchorite, The Guardian, etc. - which gave me the feeling of following along an ongoing reveal of a spread of Tarot cards and occasionally making the chapters feel like little Horror short stories or vignettes by themselves. To me, Fehervari excelled at building tension throughout the novel, so much so that I was palpably excited and anxious when it came to the culminations to Act 1 and Act 3 that had been brewing for so long. That cast of characters of the story is small, but consistent and interesting. Another staple of Fehervari's writing is the "spiritual journey": his stories are less about the events happening and whether characters will make it from A through B to C, but much more about the inner turmoils of his "travellers" which, according to the supernatural laws of the 40k universe, shape the world around them and how the universe (and the nightmare that it floats within) responds to them. This is true for the cast of Cold Covenant, too, and I feel that each gets an appropriate character development and fitting resolution by the end.
The song is not without its dissonances, though: the crew of the Tortuga (the ship of the deserter's company), despite the weight of the guilt that the would-be-deserters experience for their fate and their transgression against them, remains mostly faceless and anonymous. It felt to me like an oversight to keep it like that and I think it would have enhanced the impact of the final section of the book even more if the fate of the crew would have been given more flesh as a tragedy that happened to specific people and less as a statistic for the sins of the protagonists.
Apart from that, I feel like the book really nailed the payoffs in the final third, giving the half-a-dozen characters appropriate solutions to their arcs, most of which still stuck with me way after reading the final page.
All said, I'm still digesting the novel, and I'm sure I'll return to it at some point in the future, as I have to for every other Coil story so far. If you're already familiar with Fehervari's work, you won't need me to push you into to reading this, but I do recommend this book to any potential reader who laments the apparent demise of the Warhammer Horror line, and to everyone who has an interest in a slow-burning ghost story set on an icy world of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
I'm off to re-read The Reverie now, to listen to the verses of the Coil a bit more. So it flows.
Fehervari's stories have always went against the grain of 40k literature: they are subtle instead of bombastic, slow burns instead of wild adventures; they dare to be confusing instead of straightforward, preferring non-linear structures and dream-like logic and expecting readers to go with the flow along with the characters. They reward multiple readings to pick up on references to other stories and recurring motifs, characters and places. That is not to say that this is a homework-heavy set of stories: don't be afraid to jump into The Coil at any point you like; it's not an ongoing series per se, but more a collection of (mostly) stand-alone (Horror-)stories that gravitate around a shared, mostly isolated corner of the 40k cosmos, like 40ks version of the Cthulhu- or Hastur-mythos.
Cold Covenant fits neatly into this pattern: It's set on a backwater planet under Imperial rule and it's cast of characters consist of comparative low-lives: a group of would-be-deserters of the Imperial Guard as well as a drifter who is looking for a way to escape her past, preferably off-planet. The stakes stay low and personal: this is not a battle for the fate of a planet, but a story about the consequences of choices and the personal struggles of a handful of characters. Terrible choices and struggling on the edge of damnation, yes, but still.
Genre-wise Cold Covenant is, like all of the Coil stories, first and foremost a horror-novel. As Fehervari writes in the "Afterwyrd" to the Special Edition of the book: "... it's a Warhammer *horror* story, regardless of the label, or lack of a formal one. Hopefully the blurb and cover art prepared you for that, though if you know my reputation, you'd expect nothing else. I've been writing horror from the start, even if my early stories were veiled as military SF." To get a bit more nuanced, I really loved that Cold Covenant reads like a cross between a western, a sailors myth and a ghost story. I got strong Civil War western vibes from the crew of deserters hatching and carrying out their plan to escape their regiment, and the story at large - an abandoned, sunk ship that yet contains treasures, with the faithless mutineers being inevitably drawn back towards their betrayal - reads almost like a yarn spun by a haggard seaman after a pint too much on a stormy night. Ghosts - the imagined and the real, of the past and the future (as if there were a difference in this world) - have always been a prominent feature of the Coil stories, and Fehervari makes this a core feature of the plot and the vibe of his latest novel.
The novel has a melancholic and apprehensive mood, and the story reads even slower than most of his other novels. Personally, if you excuse the worn metaphor, I enjoyed reading it like a fine wine, slowly digesting each chapter and letting it simmer before going over to the next section. The chapters are all titled in the 'The Noun' format - The Hunter, The Anchorite, The Guardian, etc. - which gave me the feeling of following along an ongoing reveal of a spread of Tarot cards and occasionally making the chapters feel like little Horror short stories or vignettes by themselves. To me, Fehervari excelled at building tension throughout the novel, so much so that I was palpably excited and anxious when it came to the culminations to Act 1 and Act 3 that had been brewing for so long. That cast of characters of the story is small, but consistent and interesting. Another staple of Fehervari's writing is the "spiritual journey": his stories are less about the events happening and whether characters will make it from A through B to C, but much more about the inner turmoils of his "travellers" which, according to the supernatural laws of the 40k universe, shape the world around them and how the universe (and the nightmare that it floats within) responds to them. This is true for the cast of Cold Covenant, too, and I feel that each gets an appropriate character development and fitting resolution by the end.
The song is not without its dissonances, though: the crew of the Tortuga (the ship of the deserter's company), despite the weight of the guilt that the would-be-deserters experience for their fate and their transgression against them, remains mostly faceless and anonymous. It felt to me like an oversight to keep it like that and I think it would have enhanced the impact of the final section of the book even more if the fate of the crew would have been given more flesh as a tragedy that happened to specific people and less as a statistic for the sins of the protagonists.
Apart from that, I feel like the book really nailed the payoffs in the final third, giving the half-a-dozen characters appropriate solutions to their arcs, most of which still stuck with me way after reading the final page.
All said, I'm still digesting the novel, and I'm sure I'll return to it at some point in the future, as I have to for every other Coil story so far. If you're already familiar with Fehervari's work, you won't need me to push you into to reading this, but I do recommend this book to any potential reader who laments the apparent demise of the Warhammer Horror line, and to everyone who has an interest in a slow-burning ghost story set on an icy world of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
I'm off to re-read The Reverie now, to listen to the verses of the Coil a bit more. So it flows.
October 22, 2026
"Catastrophe has consecrated the Shrine of Concordant Perspicacity"
"the Ceremony of Altitudinous Declension"
"A benediction of Abyssal Radiance"
"The deep hungers to be heeded"
"Unless one preambulates in more exalted circles, beyond the bark and bite of the Dog-Emperor's fanatical puppies"
"telluric temptations"
"The Concupiscent Hearth"
"Do what you wish, and wish without shame, for guilt is the only flaw"
"Faith affirms ignorance. Ignorance confirms impotence"
"Humanity is driven by meaning above all else. Facts are merely hoops we have to jump through to get what we believe in"
"meaning eclipses truth, for the heart transcends the head"
- Fehervari's new book is full of quotes like that. We are truly blessed that this man came back to publishing novels for the Black Library after 6 years missing in action (since The Reverie).
I'm also very impressed how he signed the limited edition of "Cold Covenenant". Fehervari was drawing weird eyes or phrases like "So it goes" or "A shadow-torn reality" alongside his autograph. That is a huge dedication for hundreds of readers who got the LE copy. I just have the basic hardback version of the book but anyone can watch the cute stylized Fehervari autographs of the novel people are posting on social media. Let us hope his next Dark Coil novel takes less than 6 years to write...
"the Ceremony of Altitudinous Declension"
"A benediction of Abyssal Radiance"
"The deep hungers to be heeded"
"Unless one preambulates in more exalted circles, beyond the bark and bite of the Dog-Emperor's fanatical puppies"
"telluric temptations"
"The Concupiscent Hearth"
"Do what you wish, and wish without shame, for guilt is the only flaw"
"Faith affirms ignorance. Ignorance confirms impotence"
"Humanity is driven by meaning above all else. Facts are merely hoops we have to jump through to get what we believe in"
"meaning eclipses truth, for the heart transcends the head"
- Fehervari's new book is full of quotes like that. We are truly blessed that this man came back to publishing novels for the Black Library after 6 years missing in action (since The Reverie).
I'm also very impressed how he signed the limited edition of "Cold Covenenant". Fehervari was drawing weird eyes or phrases like "So it goes" or "A shadow-torn reality" alongside his autograph. That is a huge dedication for hundreds of readers who got the LE copy. I just have the basic hardback version of the book but anyone can watch the cute stylized Fehervari autographs of the novel people are posting on social media. Let us hope his next Dark Coil novel takes less than 6 years to write...
October 23, 2026
A truly phenomenal read that had me gripped from start to finish! Cold Covenant is at heart a ghost story, a story of idealism bought with treachery and murder, of the myriad ways to fall into darkness that lie in wait for the unwary, the foolish or the wilfully blind, set on an icy world filled with ghosts and mysteries.
The Dark Coil is perhaps the very best example of how deep and engaging the 40k universe can be when you go beyond just the action sequences and front-line warfare stories. Fehervari has nailed it with every story he's written for Warhammer, and Cold Covenant is not an exception. Easily a 5/5 book for me, and I look forward to returning to the Coil in the future when Fehervari brings us back.
The Dark Coil is perhaps the very best example of how deep and engaging the 40k universe can be when you go beyond just the action sequences and front-line warfare stories. Fehervari has nailed it with every story he's written for Warhammer, and Cold Covenant is not an exception. Easily a 5/5 book for me, and I look forward to returning to the Coil in the future when Fehervari brings us back.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews