Like their fore-bearers on the wind-swept plains of Chogoris, the White Scars Legion have been riding ahead of the Great Crusade to roam freely and make war in their own way. While most of their peers consider them to be as inscrutable as the Twentieth, as mystical as the Fifteenth and as savage as the Sixth Legion, the Legion of the Great Khan couldn’t care less for the opinions of the Imperium and are happy to keep their intricate culture and idiosyncratic nature to themselves.

Being independent as they are, neither the Warmaster nor the Emperor can be sure of where their loyalties will fall when the Imperium breaks in two. The mercurial Khan and his sons are forced to finally make a decision on where they will stand when the winds turn and the galactic plains burn, a choice that will cost them dearly and force them upon a bloody road towards their finest hour…

This Omnibus tracks the story of Jaghatai Khan and his Ordu from the early fulcrum that decides their loyalties in the Heresy across the grueling times of being hunted by their former brothers-in-arms towards their ultimate destiny upon the Birthworld.

The White Scars were, prior to the publication of the Horus Heresy as a series of novels, almost as much of an enigma to fans of the setting as they are to their fellow Legions in the 31st millenium. They do have a canonically important role to play during the grand finale of the civil war on Terra, although there was little known or written down about their involvement prior to the Siege. Chris Wraight was handed the reins of the novel Scars (2013), Book 28 of the series, which was supposed to properly introduce the sons of Chogoris and their primarch, Jaghatai Khan, to the novels. Wraight had previously written Brotherhood of the Storm, a limited edition novella that spotlighted their way of war and introduced two characters that would sit at the heart of the evolution, conflict and drama of the Scars’ series-long arc.

In his afterword to Scars, Wraight wrote:

I loved writing the White Scars. I was particularly lucky to end up working on them as, almost alone among the various factions present in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, they’d had virtually no attention during the Horus Heresy series thus far. They were a blank slate, an unknown quantity. Even on the M41 side of things they were still relatively unknown, so starting work on a White Scars story felt like breaking new ground – a rare privilege in a series that’s now twenty-eight books in.

Working up the Legion in conceptual form was great fun. Even before the limited edition novella Brotherhood of the Storm was written, some key ideas had been laid down. The first of these was symmetry between the obscurity of the V Legion in the real world and in the fictional universe. It couldn’t be an accident that hardly anyone referenced the Khan in the Heresy – it had to be a feature of his style of war. This fit nicely, it seemed to me, with the plains-nomad imagery that’s always been the hallmark of the White Scars. So the Khan became an outsider, an ‘other’, someone about whom even the Emperor knew little and whose actions became uniquely hard to predict. To the extent that every primarch has a ‘feature’, that’s his.

In an almost singular example of authorial authority over a single Legion, Wraight kept writing the whole arc of the White Scars ongoing from Brotherhood of the Storm and Scars. This arc is told through an arrangement of short-stories and their second novel The Path of Heaven all the way to the sixth novel of The Siege of Terra, Warhawk. Scars, Path of Heaven and Warhawk (with added texture provided by the inserted short-stories) basically form a trilogy of their own, with a neat three-act structure, an established and recurring cast of protagonists and antagonists and a clear narrative direction and flow.

When I sat down to arrange the Horus Heresy stories in omnibus format, this was actually one of the very first omnibuses that I compiled simply because of how clear-cut and simple the arrangement of the stories is. Chris Wraight even ordered his stories by himself on his website). The story progression of the White Scars is one of the most straightforward ones and there’s not much back-and-forth timeline-wise between the stories.

Beside the obvious stories with the White Scars as protagonists, I added two short-stories about their antagonists as well (both also penned by Wraight). The Khan’s nemesis across the trilogy turns out to be his brother Mortarion, who he’ll clash with in each of the three novels. Preceding and following their initial encounter in Scars, where Mortarion is sent to make sure that the Khan chooses the right side in the war, the Lord of Death is on his own journey of self-discovery. The short-story Daemonology shows an important episode in the continuing struggle of the staunch anti-psyker Mortarion with his place amongst Horus’ fraternity of demonologists and sorcerers.

In The Path of Heaven, Moratarion grudgingly enlists the assistance of another traitor Legion to finally hunt down his elusive brother: the Emperor’s Children under Lord-Commander Eidolon. Eidolon has at this point of the series been through quite a lot of his own, and Path of Heaven shows him much changed from the boisterous, toweringly arrogant peacock from the opening trilogy. The short-story (originally audio drama) The Soul, Severed takes a closer look at Eidolon, his new-found powers and the power struggles between the Kakophoni, those daemonic Legionnaires that will later become known as Noise Marines.

The third faction to be a continuous presence in Wraight’s Scars-series are the Thousand Sons, mostly represented by Revuel Arvida, a lone Thousand Son that will accompany the Scars on their journey. He was originally introduced in the short-story Rebirth and joins the main arc of the Scars later on.

Reading all of these stories by Wraight in the right order gives an inclined reader one of the most well-rounded and, in my opinion, best arcs of the whole series. It’s just a shame that, for all their narrative congruence and clear sequence, the various short-stories are belatedly spread out over a lot of different anthologies.

If you have read all of the stories, I whole-heartedly recommend the eShort Restorer as an beautiful epilogue to the whole arc and as a neat segue into The Siege of Terra.

Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris by Chris Wraight breaks with Primarchs-tradition in that it doesn't present a twist on an established author-primarch-pairing or fill a gap in narrative or characterisation for the primarch on question, but rather doubles down on the strengths of what already has been written about its subject in the mainline series. The book is almost a victory lap for Chris Wraight and his take on the Scars, giving author and readers opportunity to spend more time with these characters after the harrowing road up to and through The Path of Heaven before the culminating events of The Siege of Terra. The book is structured around vignettes from the Great Crusade that showcase the character of the Khan and his Legion, which are centered around the build-up to a defining event in Imperial history: the Council of Nikaea, where the Emperor held court over the fate of psykers amongst the Legiones Astartes (see The Burning of Prospero). Here's Chris Wraight talking about Warhawk of Chogoris

The Burning of Prospero is required reading, as the events on Prospero and the fate of Magnus are important to the arc of the Khan and Revuel Arvida.

If you haven't already, you should read Shattersong to get background on the Emperor’s Children and the events of Isstvan V.

This Omnibus tells the complete story of the Scars until they make it back to Terra.

The story of the Death Guard and Mortarion gets expanded upon and concluded in Shadow of the Warmaster II: Lords of Death. Reading both Lords and Ordu fully prepares you for the sixth Siege Of Terra novel Warhawk, where Mortarion and the Khan clash for a final time.

The Omnibus Through The Neath picks up on the Thousand Sons and Magnus and would be another natural follow-up to this Omnibus.

The following are recommendations from other series and the wider Black Library canon. If you are interested in the characters, factions or themes that were part this omnibus, the following books might also be to your liking.

Books from the 41st millenium:

• The Last Hunt by Robbie MacNiven

  • This novel by Robbie MacNiven is an example for a "current times" novel about the White Scars of the 41st millenium, in this case on the hunt for a tendril of a tyranid Hive Fleet. The novel is also available alongside another novel (Hunt for Voldorius by Andy Hoare) as well as two novellas and two short-stories in Masters of the Hunt: The White Scars Omnibus

• The Damocles Gulf Crusade

  • The Damocles Gulf Crusade was a far-reaching conflict between the Imperium and the alien T'au Empire. The White Scars were the leading Space Marine Chapter in this conflict, so you can find them in action in many of the stories about the Damocles war. There are two novels about the Damocles Gulf Crusade, Storm of Damocles by Justin D. Hill and Blades of Damocles by Phil Kelly, as well as an anthology of four novellas (Damocles by Phil Kelly, Guy Haley, Ben Counter and Josh Reynolds).