Review: A Sanctuary of Wyrms

A Sanctuary of Wyrms by Peter Fehervari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You remember the Silent Cartographer mission from Halo: Combat Evolved Game. The whole sense of mystery and horror, as the Master Chief arrives at the dark swamp, and slowly descends into the maw to uncover an ancient evil?

That's the sense of atmosphere you get while reading 'A Sanctuary of Wyrms'.

The story starts without preamble and ends without a climax. Detailing the internecine period which forms the meat of this all too short, but engaging narrative.

A group of tau and human turncoats are researching a mysterious yet overwhelming backwater planet, which is a world of exile for broken and unneeded tools of the greater good.

There, they discover a sealed bunker complex, littered with dead bodies of Space marines, of the deathwatch. For those of you who know what this entails, might be able to discern just how soon shit is gonna hit the fan.

In the face of a greater evil, old enemies put aside their differences to try and stop it.

A great thing about this really short story is that it barely gives you anything in form of exposition, preferring instead to show you the events that might've transpired. This, combined with the ancient atmosphere of the world and its inhabitants, allows you fill in the blanks and draw conclusions as to what might've transpired. Like a short detective novel.

Then, by leaving the story of our POV character unfinished, there at the end is this sense of yearning and empathy, to know what happened. Did they succeed in the mission? What of those who survived? How did these events transpire in the first place?

There is this little bit of a head cannon I've formulated based on the tid bits of information.

The deathwatch and the inquisition brought or chased some variants of a gene stealer cult to this planet, to use its toxic microbiome to develop a bioweapon. That failed, obviously. In embarking to neutralize this threat, the Astartes or their Mechanicus attachment, determined the chance for escape of the threat to be high enough, that it sealed the doors and trapped the lifeforms inside. Then committed suicide to make sure the information can never be extracted from it.

Then the last survivor of the Deathwatch, an Iron Hands warrior, stayed alive depending on only its cybernetics. Only to reawaken when the tau inadvertently reopened the containment.

The additional piece of lore, as to how the indigenous species of the planet, were somehow humans from ages ago, who were altered by the planet itself, makes you wonder, just how many millennia ago did this happen, and just how long was the Iron hands lying dormant inside that tomb. This and other brain food, makes me want to read a full version of this adventure, if it's available.

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