Editing Horus Heresy (section)

===Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First===
While the campaign for Ullanor takes place, the Emperor tasks the Lion with pacifying an irrelevant little world on the galactic fringe that had already been considered compliant. The Lion begins fortifying the world and bringing in more troops and fleets, keeping his true intentions to himself, while his senior commanders are keen to move on and earn real glory elsewhere. As it turns out, the planet was being used as a feeding world for the [[Khrave]], a race of uber-psychic xenos from before the [[Fall of the Eldar]] that can read minds, crush tanks with a gesture, and possess people in their millions from outside of a solar system. The book shows how clever and callous the Lion could be by [[Alpharius|coming up with a massively convoluted plan]] that he needed to keep secret from a race of mind readers, even going so far as to issue seemingly contradictory orders to his men to confuse the enemy as well as [[Perturabo|knowingly sacrificing millions of mortal lives]] in order to escalate the conflict and draw out the Khrave's leader in order to destroy them. This is all interspersed with some of his brief meetings with the [[Emperor]], highlighting how similar the two of them were in mindset. As the dutiful firstborn son, the Lion seemed to always know what his father desired and was the one most trusted to enact it. At one point, the Lion laments that his own contribution to the Imperium is nothing but ash and destruction, but the Emperor explains that this is the point of him and the I Legion: to do the things that even Konrad Curze and Leman Russ cannot, such as the complete erasure of opponents too troublesome to allow to exist (including obliterating all memory of them), and to do it without the need for recognition, accolades, or ceremony. To briefly retouch on a previous point though: the book does a good job of fleshing out the role of the I Legion. If the VIth are the Emperor's executioners, and the VIIIth his terror Legion, then the Ist are his exterminators. This, combined with the previously mentioned unparalleled trust Big-E has for his first son is likely why, alone of the rest of the Imperium (probably not including the Custodes) the Dark Angels are trusted with archeotech from the Dark Age of Technology so dangerous that not even the Cog-boys know it exists, including weapons so destructive that they probably outclass anything but Necron-tech, which is really saying something. The book even ends with the Lion having potentially [[Grey Knights|mind wiped his own Space Marines so that they cannot remember who they just fought.]] What the novel does best is illuminate the labyrinthine inner workings of the Dark Angels, showing why even the Alpha Legion saw they were too tough a nut to crack. There are orders and cabals and subdivisions of orders and cabals threaded throughout the legion's structure, reaching across rank, station, and specialization, all of which are linked by a complex and ever-expanding web of coded heraldries, hidden symbols, and secret passphrases that only the Lion seems to fully grasp.

The book also reads like a tie-in novel to the recently released Horus Heresy 9: Crusade. It has many references to items and formations that were first introduced only months earlier such as the ''Fusil Actinaeus'', the Excindio battle-automata, Dreadwing Interemptors, Firewing Enigmatii Cabals, and the various hidden Orders of the Hekatonystika. It also disappoints because it actually shows the secret arsenals of those orders that are tantalizingly NOT represented on the tabletop, such as Fire Raptors equipped with psionic lance weapons, assault psycannons, archaeotech pistols [[Grimdark|that erase their target from memory]], and the Lion wearing a psychic dampening cloak.