Set in the Warhammer/Black Library universe, this title has been republished in an American edition as an oversized hardcover. And being a Warhammer book, set in a vicious interstellar war between humanity and Chaos, there's much more darkness than light. But the oversize pages are good for displaying huge warships cruising through space, the landscape of a desolate planet or the dreadful artifact of the book's subtitle. A millennia ago men were prohibited from being warriors. The Adepta Sororitas were organized to replace them. As the story begins, an amnesiac young woman is babbling in a cell, waiting for an Inquisitor to arrive to determine whether her ravings mark her as a blasphemer or a traumatized innocent. But she's not just a passive victim. When a Chaos-corrupted Adepta guard tries to kill the babbling woman before the Inquisitor arrives, the woman springs forward and rips the demon-beast out of the guard's body with her bare hands. She is, it turns out, Ephrael Stern, one of the Adepta Sororitas, whose battered condition indicates she's suffered through a crisis herself. Now, accompanied by the fanatical Inquisitor Hand, Ephrael retraces her steps to the planet Parnis to discover what Chaos is building there. In this volume, some questions are answered, while more remain open. But the book is uncommonly interesting and the illustrations are great. Walker's grayscale, b&w CGI artwork is extremely effective in the oversized format, and Walker's people look more human than most Warhammer characters.