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  • The Fall of Cadia

  • Warhammer 40,000
  • By: Robert Rath
  • Narrated by: David Seddon
  • Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
  • 4.9 out of 5 stars (14 ratings)

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The Fall of Cadia cover art

The Fall of Cadia

By: Robert Rath
Narrated by: David Seddon
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Summary

An Astra Militarum Audiobook

Cadia. This proud world stood defiant for centuries – a bulwark against the forces of Chaos residing in the Eye of Terror. All of this would change when it was targeted for destruction by Abaddon the Despoiler as part of his Thirteenth Black Crusade.

LISTEN TO IT BECAUSE

The Fall of Cadia is a touchstone moment of the Warhammer 40,000 timeline. This incredible battle led to the opening of the Great Rift and ushered in a grim new era in which even greater threats assailed the Imperium.

THE STORY

Cadia licks its wounds in the wake of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. The heretic forces retreat on all fronts. The day is won. But Lord Castellan Creed cannot rest easy. Something tells him the assault was a mere prelude to something greater, something more final. He is right. Out of the Eye of Terror comes Abaddon the Despoiler, at the head of a warhost unmatched in scale since the dread days of the Horus Heresy.

In the face of the looming apocalypse, Creed must weld the champions of Cadia into a bulwark capable of withstanding Abaddon’s fury. And in orbit, the Despoiler himself finds his own alliance teetering on a knife edge…

This is a tale told at epic scale, from the tables of high command to the slaughter of the pylon fields, and with a huge cast of characters from self-styled demigods to the rank-and-file foot soldiers of the Imperium.

This is the story of Abaddon’s greatest conquest. This is Cadia’s last stand.

©2024 Games Workshop Limited (P)2024 Games Workshop Limited

What listeners say about The Fall of Cadia

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Excellent

Excellently written and read. Thourghly enjoyed the scenes with Trayzn and Cawl. Abaddon being a total baddass.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Cadia Stands!

An epic journey through the last days of Cadia with heaps of well known characters and some new ones that you are genuinely rooting for! It’s a long read for a Warhammer 40k book but it held my attention and even made me quite emotional- I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.

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Excellent narration, excellent writing

My new favourite audiobook. I was absolutely hooked. Some of the best narration, best story and best plot that exists. Ending was a bit sad, but wasn't completely disappointed.

CADIA STANDS!

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Stunning

This may be my new favourite Black Library title. What a way to see out Cadia, and a tribute to the humans of the imperium, not just the Astartes. brilliantly written, brilliantly narrated.

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excellent book, my favourite is 40k novel so far

would recommend. good characters, epic scale, I like the politics and pov.from each faction

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Great lore even better with new narrator

Really interesting and intriguing book that (for me) fleshes out the story of the fall, I listened to this before with mark elstobs narration and that was just awful! Well BL for getting a quality narrator this time

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Cadia broke before the guard did

In the beginning I was worried that I had to many characters to remember or battlefronts to keep track of… but it works. Each POV is distinct and necessary. Somehow you can see the whole world at war, all at once.

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Epic conflict well told. Much improved narration

Re listening to this I realised how many details I’d missed from the previous version because I was trying to ignore the voice actor. This version is way better. It’s a well told planetary level siege from both sides of the conflict with lord of arcs that conclude and converge at the end. Very satisfying.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A better audio treatment for a solid enough story

I'm pleased Black LIbrary saw fit to re-release this audiobook with David Seddon to replace Mark Elstob—who did the original narration and populated the battle for Cadia with grating, silly voices that bore no relation to the characters in previous productions. David Seddon is a good narrator and perhaps crucially for a Cadia-based story, he has a solid command of the accents of North-East England (for anyone unfamiliar with previous audiobooks, it's a kind a verbal shorthand of W40k audiobooks that all Cadians are from the North East, in the same way that all Tanith are Scots or Irish).

Anyone familiar with W40k lore already knows the events of the fall of Cadia, but Robert Rath populates the bare bones with rich characterisation, fleshing out and making figures such as Ursarkar E. Creed into human, flawed and interesting characters.
However, at twenty hours, the limits of my interest were hit before this audiobook ended—just like with the End And The Death, the problem is that while it's fun to be on the journey, when you already know how the story ends, there's not much in the way of tension or 'will-they-won't they' anxiety that even a skilled author like Rath can raise as the endgame approaches.

The second reason The Fall of Cadia was not as fun to me as it could've been is the continual buffing-up of Abaddon The Despoiler, who is, yet again, depicted as a brilliant general who can do no wrong (in the same way every past Black Crusade has been rewritten as a brilliant strategic victory) who explicitly refuses the gifts of the Chaos Gods i.e. he has no superpowers, Yet, he unaccountably wades through loyalist space marines, dispatching two or three with a every blow, and is impervious to weapons fire which mysteriously misses him. Daddy's old terminator suit must be some serious plot armour. Abaddon's an interesting character when you see him politicking to hold the various alliances of the Black Legion together, but when he's the bad guy, the Black Library policy seems to be that he has to be bigged-up at every opportunity. It annoys me because it's illogical and inconsistent and it's bad storytelling: characters who don't make mistakes and cannot fail are not interesting. At the end of the day, Abaddon's a space marine, not a primarch. He has no Chaos gifts, yet by some accident of history, he's the head baddie of Chaos, so he needs to be positioned as buff enough to pose a credible threat to Guilliman or the Lion.

Maybe it's just me, but I've read enough stories about guardsmen being slaughtered wholesale by Chaos marines just to prove how OP they are. The best bits of Fall of Cadia for me are the handful of moments when the plucky Cadians get their own back, and actually dispatch a few chaos marines—nice to know it's actually a thing that normal people are allowed to kill them, otherwise you'd wonder why the Astra Militarum even existed.

Nonetheless, rants aside—David Seddon's excellent, and this is good fun for lore-junkies that puts much-needed flesh on the bare bones of established history, but the inevitability of the plot means the Fall of Cadia falls some way short of the brilliance of Rath's The Infinite and the Divine.

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