Danie Ware’s first full-length novel for Black Library, The Triumph of Saint Katherine, is available to pre-order from Saturday. To celebrate, we sat down with one of the new stars of Warhammer literature to get the low-down on the new book and find out what it’s like to write about the Adepta Sororitas.
Warhammer Community: How would you describe The Triumph of Saint Katherine?Danie Ware: The Triumph of Saint Katherine tells the tale of the Relic Saint, and how she still inspires faith, honour, and battles across the galaxy. It explains why she is still such an inspiration, and how she can command and lead the Adepta Sororitas, the Astra Militarum, or any Imperial force that follows her. It’s a battle story, with a proper big nasty and plenty of kicking butt, but it’s less about tactics and more about pure courage – facing the enemy, and the darkness and despair that they bring. It’s about finding the light in your own heart and conjuring that light in the hearts of others. It has strong, epic themes – legend, myth, and allegory – and who knows, perhaps it’s allegorical in itself.
WarCom: How did you prepare and research before putting pen to paper? We’re guessing lots of incense was involved.
Danie: Always! As ever with Sisters stories, I need to be familiar with the codex, but this one was slightly different because I had to understand Katherine (the warrior, the saint, the history) and all six Orders.*
It’s very easy to think of the Sisters as two-dimensional – they smite heresy and sing hymns. This was an opportunity to look at each Order in turn and what makes it unique – to delve into its subtleties, understand what it stands for, and how it differs from the other five. It was a fantastic opportunity to illustrate the Sisters as multi-faceted and complex.
WarCom: What can you tell us about the book's protagonist?
Danie: Sister Avra is a member of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, and she’s very young. Deployed to the battlefield, she’s overwhelmed to learn of the Triumph’s presence and to discover that members of her own Order will be offering Katherine an honour guard. The Sisters have been truly blessed, and it’s more than Avra could ever have dared pray for. As the story opens, she carries a shard of shame in her heart, and she seeks to offer her life, as is fitting – but the Emperor, it seems, has other plans.
WarCom: What attracts you to writing for the Adepta Sororitas?
Danie: Two answers to this one!
Purely practically, when I first wrote Mercy in 2017, there was very little Sisters mythology out there. Only James Swallow’s wonderful two books, Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil,** and the Adepta Sororitas codexes. It seemed like a good place to get a toehold.
On a slightly deeper level, I’ve been a gamer and wargamer for 35 years, and I will die on the hill of a woman’s right to geek. Women in the hobby absolutely deserve representation – and that includes a whole cadre of female characters and miniatures with which they can identify. I’ve been really pleased to see the Sisters getting a new codex, a full mythology, and so much more love, and likewise really pleased to see more women writing for the Black Library. We’re all across the whole Imperium, and that’s as it should be!
WarCom: How different was the experience of writing a full-length novel as opposed to a short story?
Danie: This narrative isn’t exactly a standard full-length novel – it has a slightly unusual structure. The story lends itself absolutely perfectly to the idea of all six different Orders, how they complement each other (and how they don’t), and why six Exemplars are needed to bear the Saint herself. In many ways, the story is as much about the individual Orders as it is about Katherine.***
WarCom: Lastly, what do you think are the essential elements of a good Sisters of Battle story?
Danie: The very best thing about the Sisters of Battle is that they’re human. Yes, they kick butt, they purge heretics, they slay xenos, all of that good stuff, but they have a deeper aspect – which has allowed me to explore their flaws.
On the surface, words like ‘faith’ and ‘honour’ seem very simple – praise the Emperor and wallop the bad guys. But what happens when those absolutes are tested? Any character is only as interesting as their flaws and doubts. And as any soldier knows, any single warrior is only as strong as their unit – brothers or Sisters, it’s the bonds that matter.
For the Triumph of Saint Katherine, this means that the unit is more than the sum of its parts. Or, it should be…
The Triumph of Saint Katherine is available to pre-order from Saturday. In the meantime, check out some of Danie’s Adepta Sororitas short stories, such as The Bloodied Rose and Wreck and Ruin, and sign up for the Black Library newsletter to keep up to date with all of the releases in 2022.
* Do your own research into the Triumph of Saint Katherine by checking out these incredible paint jobs of the miniature.
** These are collected in Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus.
*** Learn about some of the other Imperial Saints.