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Morvenn Vahl: Spear Of Faith

Warhammer 40,000

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Morvenn Vahl: Spear Of Faith

By: Jude Reid
Narrated by: Emma Gregory
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About this listen

A Warhammer 40,000 Adepta Sororitas Audiobook

Morvenn Vahl is the Abbess Sanctorum and a High Lord of Terra, a warrior born and a faithful daughter of the Emperor. Yet she is only mortal, performing no miracles, untouched by divinity, and though she was chosen not by the Master of Mankind but by his living thralls, the faith is hers to command and to protect.

LISTEN TO IT BECAUSE

It’s a story of doubt and faith. It’s a story of the light of the God-Emperor against the darkness of the Night Lords. Can Morvenn Vahl lead the faithful to triumph, or will Ophelia VII fall to the traitors?

THE STORY

When a monster from myth threatens the cardinal world of Ophelia VII, Morvenn Vahl defies the Senatorum Imperialis and heads to the planet's defence. There, she finds a world in terror – the warlord Kol Rakhul, known as the Death of Saints, has come for the faithful and, with his Heldrake and a host of Night Lords at his back, plans to enshroud the world in flame and blood.

This is a reckoning. A holy world is being defiled, and in its defence, Morvenn Vahl must wield an army of Living Saints to stand a hope of survival, let alone victory.

©2024 Games Workshop Limited (P)2024 Games Workshop Limited Science Fiction

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All stars
Most relevant  
I think that was the best Adepta Sororitas story I've read to date.

For me, the ‘Sisters’ always come off a bit shrill and shouty. Especially in the audiobooks. They sound like Joyce Grenfell after a 72 hour meth binge.

I’m seeing an old trope emerge. That was in Daemonbreaker as well. “Our protagonist is at the top of their game. Loved and hated in equal measure. Until their own hubris brings them low. Cue redemption arc.”

I’m sure that was the plot to Top Gun.

For all that it was a well paced story. With a few twist here and there.

Best in class?

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Great book especially if you are interested in the Adepta Sororitas. The book keeps you interested until the very end.

Interesting until the last seconds

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It’s been a long while since we had a good Sororitas story and this one has the chief SoB fighting everyone including the high lords, excellent narration as well

Bloody Good

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Incredible writing, Jude write both me and women incredibly and captures the 41st millennium with ease. Add this to Emma Gregory's always perfect performance you've got a belter of a 40K novel. 10/10

10/10

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the thing I dislike is that the leafy character lives too long in the story.

the main character is really well written

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It's seemingly hard to write the sisters of battle well. Too often they're all stern nobility and selfless sacrifice with none of the hateful zealotry, but the author does a decent job of bringing the latter to the table and meshing the two facets together. It never reached the sort of ghoulish weirdness I'd hoped for, but the sororitas feel like actual soldiers of the imperial creed rather than generic light-against-the-darkness cutouts.

Morvenn's character arc is what you might expect if you're familiar with her backstory; a warrior thrust into a position of leadership who refuses to be a compliant pawn for those who elevated her but one who has to learn to fill her new role all the same. Her supporting cast are mostly single note characters, though there's several enjoyable archetypes among them.

The main antagonists steal the show for me though. The Death of Saints is a great concept for a villain, a partially tragic figure driven by vengeance and somewhat a monster of the Imperium's own making. This is doubly true for Lethe, a prisoner and a victim of the casual and uncaring brutality of imperial dogma. It was her story that I was most invested in by the end. Sadly most of the other chaos aligned characters are less interesting; plenty of gibbering fanatics with no sense of self-preservation or self-interest. They might have landed better if they'd been paired with some unhinged, frothing devotion from the Imperial forces.

The action is frequent and usually entertainingly written; good quality bolter porn with plenty of carnage and cool fights between recognisable combatants, especially when it comes to the main character and her warsuit. The narration was mostly on point too, though there were a few cartoonishly high pitched voices. The voice used for Death of Saints starts off in that territory too, though the narrator quickly settles into one with more gravitas as the story progresses.

One final criticism worth mentioning is that the high lords of terra feel too uniform in their depiction as cowardly politicians, especially after their varying depictions in the Watchers of the Throne books.

Fun action with interesting antagonists

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Great time. loved seeing a bit more about Morvenn Vahl. ophelia 7 seems to be under seige a lot

Great Sisters novelq

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I enjoyed the back Templar team up towards the middle of the story , very good listen

I love the narrator’s ability to voice many characters so well

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if you like loore on warhammer 40k. don't listen to this. this book is heresy

lame story

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This audiobook came out a week after Jude Reid's previous W40k contribution, Daemonbreaker. That was an odd decision, given the two books' similarities. Both feature a member of the Sisters of Battle who crashes about in bellicose sororitas fashion, yelling about the God Emperor, and slaying the mutant and the heretic, etcetera, until the hero is brought to a low point through misplaced pride, falling prey to doubt and self-recrimination—before mysteriously shrugging it off to win the day against overpowering odds.

At least Morvenn Vahl is a more sympathetic character than Celestian Sacresant Aveline, the obnoxious protagonist of Daemonbreaker. Bear in mind, this is all strictly relative. The fact that "Morvenn Vahl" is voiced by the excellent veteran Sororitas-narrator, Emma Gregory. Gregory's performance goes some way to making Vahl seem a more sympathetic character, but it remains that the Sisters of Battle are hard to love.

Essentially, we're supposed to root for Morvenn Vahl, because she's the hero—but it's fair to say she does pretty much nothing to earn our affection. In the grim, grey scale of the far future, only the reader gets to decide who the hero is. And here, it's undoubtedly the villain, the Night Lord, Death of Saints. His backstory told in flashbacks made for the best sections of this book and provided the Night Lord a depth of character and motivation that Morvenn Vahl herself lacked entirely. If anything, I was rooting for him by the end.

These parts also showed that given the right material, Jude Reid obviously can write. As it is, Morvenn Vahl: Spear of Faith fails for all the same reasons that Reid's previous "Creed: Ashes of Cadia" fails: both books treat existing W40k lore, established characters, events and even basic military competency as details to be variously used and then contradicted or ignored as convenient. When Reid gets it right, some of the high notes are pretty good. When they get it wrong, I don't get the sense they even realise how glaringly, obviously wrong they've got it.

Morvenn Vahl is a High Lord of Terra. The High Lords of Terra preside over a galaxy-spanning empire of a million worlds. They do not, as Vahl does a) get embroiled in the fate of insignificant individual shrine worlds to the exclusion of all other concerns or b) lead soldiers into battle wearing giant suits of armour (okay, not unless they're Captain of the Custodes, Trajann Valoris). It's like Winston Churchill personally leading a counterattack to retake the Channel Islands in 1940 while everyone around him waves their hands saying, "Winston, er London? Shouldn't we be defending London?"

Yet, Morvenn Vahl does exactly this. Despite being head of the Adepta Sororitas across the entire Imperium, she heads off to lead the defence of a shrine world against Chaos. The other High Lords say no, and given the circumstances, this feels eminently sensible. Then Valoris is wheeled in to support Vahl, despite being very much a big-picture kind of guy, not to mention extremely unlikely to care about a shrine world. But none of his motivation for helping her is explained. No sooner has Valoris has done lent Vahl a bit of his gold-armoured superman props, he's off, having served his purpose to the plot, not to be heard from again. There's a lot of this.

The role of other characters in this book is to big up, then make way for Vahl, presumably so that the reader says, 'Wow, Valoris said she was right, and he's a badass and awesome. That means she must be badass and awesome!" When it comes to believing in Morven Vahl's leadership, it's as effective as wheeling out an aged Luke Skywalker was for Star Wars' current cast of nonentities.

Valoris is just one of many instances in this book where established characters turn up, say or do something stupid that demeans them, and disappear.

In the Watchers of the Throne series, Chris Wraight constructed a magnificent picture of the High Lords of Terra as a group so shadowy and unwieldy that it hardly ever meets. It's members are scheming conspirators, each of them concerned with their own labyrinthine long games. They're fearsomely competent, not-to-be-underestimated figures concerned with the fate of entire segmenta. Cynical, lazy, back-stabbing and treacherous they may be—but stupid they are not. Yet in "Morvenn Vahl: Spear of Faith" the High Lords behave like the crusty inhabitants of a gentleman's club, spluttering with outrage because someone has entered without wearing a tie.

Fadix, Grand Master of Assassins, who played an intricate game of political Regicide during the Watchers of the Throne series, is portrayed here as a spineless idiot, simply because Morvenn Vahl needs to be shown as tough and decisive by contrast. Someone small is needed to make Morvenn Vahl look big. It's a cheap move that undermines the importance and truly staggering scale of power and influence the Council of Terra represents.

During the battle scenes, as with the Creed novel, Reid treats military logic and sense as irrelevant, even as this makes her hero appear incompetent. Vahl loses a near-impregnable fortress within hours, because the void shield generators were conveniently located in the open and unguarded. This is typical of how details that make no sense are left to stand without explanation simply because the plot requires them. At one point Reid even describes Vahl's dismay as all her painstakingly laid defences crumble. Really? One might think that such intricate planning might have involved a guard detail to protect the void shield generator, but no—this obviously untrue statement is left unchallenged. On learning that the enemy has infiltrated the tunnels under the fortress, she concludes that "This was just the sort of thing she'd expect from her enemy". Again, this telling us she'd expected this doesn't make her appear a good general, it makes her seem like a double idiot for not blocking up the tunnels, booby-trapping them or doing anything that might constitute a logical response to a likely route of attack?

Like the Creed book, this is littered with details that fly in the face of all known facts. It's bad enough when the Fabricator General of Mars—missing, presumed dead following the events of "The Dark City"—is sitting in a meeting of the High Lords (conveniently going on just when Vahl arrives back from war). That goes completely unexplained, but worse is yet to come.

Guilliman turns up. On Terra. That's right, Robouté Guilliman, the primarch who is leading a crusade on the other side of the galaxy? Him. Like one of the Avengers making a guest appearance in some hateful Marvel TV series, he walks on set without explanation and apparently for the sole purpose of telling the hero that she was right and completely amazing. Well done, our girl.

Never mind that this stinks of cheap fan service and more attempts to buff up Vahl by showing how much better characters think she's amazing. Guilliman is with Fleet Primus on the Indomitus Crusade, moving ever further away from Terra since its departure. At this point, it would literally take him years to pop back to Terra. Yet here he is— flying in the face of known facts and all continuity—because Reid needs a way of showing us, that Morvenn Vahl was Right All Along.

This lazy abuse of characters takes a wrecking ball to a history painstakingly built up by successive authors. The works of Wraight, Guy Haley and others have imbued the Era Indomitus with stories and characters to match the epic scale of its events. Morvenn Vahl, by comparison, feels small—in every sense.

Makes everything feel small

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