It's an acceptable novel that starts out a bit weak but that ends up delivering quite a lot of cool Chaos imagery.
The first 150 pages or so are a bit of a wash, not delivering much new in the 'Rise of a Chaos Warrior' trope in Warhammer; some random battles, the gifted child that slowly grows into a superlative warrior through dedication and fervour, leading to an unstoppable rise to power and the slow expansion of the warrior's native tribe, and so on.
It's all been done before in Warhammer fiction and I was pretty unimpressed. Couple that with a few memorable instances of annoyance where I thought that the writing itself felt off, and I began to feel a bit down about the whole thing.
But then, it's an origins novel so I should've gone a bit easier on it at the start. With tales like this we already know that at a certain point there will have to be something quite out of the ordinary to upset the leisurely upward curve. So in order to take Valkia from the path of becoming just another warlord to the one where she will end up becoming the Consort of the Blood God himself, there had to be something momentous that would radically push the narrative into a new direction.
Enter Locephax, the Slaaneshi daemon sent to tempt Valkia away from her patron lord and to the God of Pleasure and Pain. At first there's some games being played but as she finally understands the nature of her enemy Valkia ignites in a rage and what follows is an exceptionally fun and cool couple of chapters that lead to the rest of the novel being a pretty compulsory read.
As for the overarching narrative of the Schwarzvulf tribe: Though Cawkwell does her best to write a compelling set of characters to support (and antagonise) our anti-heroine with, they can't help but become un-interesting if you realize that Valkia is going to outlast all of them. No matter how much they might scrabble for position and power. There are still a few surprises here and there though, and the ending of each character arc is at least satisfying or sadly poignant. The only one whose actions bothered me a bit, or at least gave me pause, were those of Valkia's half-brother, who veered from the determined, to the cowardly, to the flat-out heroic, to the cowardly again.
I understand what Cawkwell was going for, but there maybe should've been a little more exploration of his character to make it seem less jarring.
But all in all, it was actually a decent read.
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Lastly, a small note: Depictions of the Chaos Wastes are always some of the most fun things to read in the whole of Warhammer and though it here felt a bit bland, the Khornate imagery that follows on its heels is exceptionally compelling. It's always surprising, and a little bit dangerous, when larger than life events from the lore are explored in a novel, but Cawkwell knows not to overstep the mark and to allude rather than to show outright. Valkia's title of Consort to Khorne always rang a bit improbable and 'out there' to me, but when we get down to those scenes it's pretty impressively done, intimating that Consort wouldn't necessarily have the connotations that you would expect it to have, especially when you're talking about a God of blood and violence.
Scan from the Warriors of Chaos rulebook (2009).
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After I had read the novel, I also picked up the Champions of Chaos omnibus in order to read Cawkwell's other Valkia stories. There are four in total and all of them, if you like your Warhammer, are very fun and intelligent reads wherein Cawkwell quite succesfully manages to engage the reader with different approaches.
Bloodraven is the, kind of obligatory, story of the event that put Valkia the Bloody on the map, the act of atrocity that brought her to the attention of the world at large; her invasion of the northernmost Dwarven stronghold in the World's Edge Mountains, where with an insane Khorne army she besieges and ultimately destroys the keep of Karak Ghulg, gifting every single dwarf, dead or living, with the titular Blood Raven; an obscene and cruel practice whereby the sternum is shattered and broken to then have the ribs splayed open in imitation of a raptor's wings.
Though the story is barely over thirty pages long, Cawkwell manages to make it feel suitably epic, delivering her fast-paced story through 4 points of view; the doomed Dwarven king and his eldest son, Bothvar the champion and leader of the Kharnate host, and Valkia the Bloody herself, who has been sent to see if any of the Dwarves are willing to see continued life and bloody glory under the banner of Khorne.
There's not much else here except warfare, as one might expect from Warhammer fiction but the Dwarven king and his sons were delivered with some surprising nuance, given the page count. Cawkwell's writing skill also seemed to have improved quite a bit since the publication of the novel 2 years before, leading to a noticably fluid narrative that doesn't outstay its welcome.
The next one up; Blood Blessing, isn't so much of a short story as it is a monologue of about a page and a half, spoken by Valkia to a dying warrior.
It is an interesting bit of dialogue in that it muses on the offer of 'Death or Glory' that Valkia usually delivers to the mortally wounded followers of Khorne, and she makes, honestly, quite a compelling argument for the listener to choose either offer. Though glory seems to be the self-evident choice, at the end of the story she will have made you see that death very well has its own reward (beyond that of 'hey, at least it'll be peaceful and stuff'). Impressive.
Reaper I had already read in the Black Library Live chapbook of 2012. I remember It was the one that made me so enthusiastic way back when, about trying out some more Valkia and Cawkwell stories... Well... it took forever to get here, I suppose, but I finally got round to it.
Reaper is still a good little tale about a fallen Empire captain who is the last survivor of a long and bloody conflict between Empire and Kharnate forces. As he lies bleeding, near to death, he is visited by a winged daemon, who offers him 'death or glory'. There's a twist or two to be had here and the conclusion to the story is a memorable one (even though I'm still a little unsure of where exactly it leads).
Harbinger rounds off the Valkia tales, and it's a bit of a pity then that Valkia is only indirectly involved. However, this one does actually manage to flesh out the world that she inhabits, making it feel alive and populated, opening us up to the hierarchy of the warriors under her command, what they do, and the new and interesting ways in which Kharnate armies wage war. It takes a step back from our heroine and makes us feel confident that even though we might not ever end up seeing her again, she's still out there, reaping skulls for the Skull Throne.
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