Faith and Fury Incoming, What’s Next for the Psychic Awakening?
Written by Jonathan Lee. October 31, 2019. 11:00pm. Tweet to: @Writerscube
Dead Gods Waking, Humanity’s Faith Shaking?
The first installment of the Psychic Awakening, Phoenix Rising, as discussed in our previous piece, revolved around the elf-like Aeldari and their morbid faction known as the Ynnari. After some nice add-ons to their tabletop rules, the first chapter of the Psychic Awakening also provided readers with another step of narrative progression. But was everything going right for the forces of mostly-good? (You’d think Humans and Space-Elves are all good, but nothing is entirely good in Warhammer 40k… but you can be super bad. Like daemons that thrive off of the excess pain of others. That kind of bad. Eesh.) By this most recent trailer, I’m thinking Humanity is next to be tested against the dark forces of Chaos.
The Story So Far (so far)
With the developments of the Phoenix Rising chapter, readers now have an idea of what’s been going on regarding the Eldar race as a whole. The most traditionalist Craftworld Eldar are struggling for survival after an interdimensional hell rift has literally split the galaxy in two. Some of the Eldar’s own planet-sized Craftworld ships even get swallowed up by the rift (subjecting all involved to all sorts of hellish experiences, including daemonic invasion). Meanwhile, the more sadistic Dark Eldar have been reeling from the aftermath of the young Ynnari faction’s initial rise, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been trying everything they can to take stabs at the newest faction of the Eldar. Last but not least, the newest faction of them all.
The Ynnari have been trying to convince the rest of the Eldar to find spiritual salvation through the awakening of a new Eldar god that’s supposedly going to be their new god of death. Whether the Ynnari are right or not is still to be discovered. Will they succeed in their quest to awaken their god and save the Eldar race–for better or worse?
The Grimdark Universe of 40k is Still… Grimdark
Alas, with every ray of hope that the narrative feeds us, things always end rather darkly. On their quest to find five fabled swords that could possibly awaken said-god-of-the-dead, the Ynnari discover the final sword to be stolen away to the depths of the realm of Chaos, particularly the realm of the Chaos god that loves Eldar souls: Slaanesh. So that’s a big nope.
Meanwhile, that very same Chaos god sent its own agent to try killing the leader of the Ynnari. It actually succeeds. But the story continues because being an agent of a god of death means having some degree of agency over one’s demise, whether deliberately or by circumstance. The Ynnari’s leader returns from death and, with the help of her comrades, takes down the Chaos daemon that had been hounding her.
But wait there’s more! After the daemon apparently vanishes, it leaves a psychic message letting them know that they had only fought a mere fraction of its true power.
I know what you’re thinking. “This isn’t even my final form!!!” And you’re probably right. But the book literally ends there: a psychic message and everyone’s bummed out that the whole fight was for almost nothing.
Final Thoughts and What’s Next in Psychic Awakening
By the latest trailer for the next chapter of the series, Faith and Fury, I’m going to guess there will at least be story bits for both the Black Templars Space Marines (hyper-religious-super-angry super soldiers) and the Sisters of Battle (essentially very angry nuns with a penchant for fire). At the end of the trailer we see the Sisters of Battle fleur-de-lis at the start of a spinning coin before the Black Templars’ Crusader’s Cross when the icon stops spinning.
As to what exactly is going to happen, well, all we have right now is “The Faith of Talledus will be tested.” A look through the usual wikis and boards showed up nothing on the name, but I think we can assume for now that it is the name of a Black Templars Space Marine. Perhaps, a new suped-up Primaris Black Templar? We’ll have to see when more news pops up!
The marching narrative is great when it comes to giving readers and players something to think about. The Warhammer community seems generally glad that Games Workshop is moving things along at all. But from a consumer-standpoint, the first book was, for 40 bucks, rather on the short side. This is considering the sizes of some of the army codices and supplements of past editions. While we can’t expect every book/supplement to be the length of a novel, it begs a look through a marketing lens. So many factions means so many books. With each book being theoretically 40 bucks… well, that’s a lot of money for anyone that wants the whole story.
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