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Death or Glory
- Cain and Jurgen come across a town devastated by the Orks. They find countless bodies rotting in the sun, and the town center in particular is covered in the corpses of the town's officials, who were all tortured to death. A sobering start to the most upbeat novel.
- Later, Cain and company free one hundred human captives from ork captivity, and find they've been living pretty badly. And that one is their ally Tayber's sister. Cain had planned to not rescue any captives, and Tayber went against him and did it anyway. If he hadn't, Tayber would have abandoned his sister to die in ork captivity.
- At the start of the book, Cain meets Kolfax, the man guiding their march through the desert. They have a little friction but end up respecting and trusting each other. After the battle at the dam, the biggest setpiece of the entire book, where you would expect any important characters who are going to die to do it there, it seems they've miraculously made it through with no significant deaths. But then Cain reviews casualties and discovers Kolfax - who wasn't even a soldier - bought it, taken by a random shot to the chest while hunkering down by the line. He still recalls him in several other books.
- Some spoilery ones from the climax. When Cain first arrived on the planet, he met an unassuming vox operator named Grenbow. Over the course of the march, Grenbow turned into a bona fide badass and hero. But when Cain's element attack the fortress in the climax and get ambushed by larger forces, Grenbow dies fighting in front of them in a hail of fire.
- Similarly, early in the march Cain has to separate two arguing people. One is a street ganger named Demara. The other, a law enforcement officer named Tamworth. In order to force them to work together, he assigns them to man their vehicle's autocannon together. The two become fast friends over the course of the march, and a great team. And then both are killed fighting in the climactic battle, their differences forgotten:
- Demara pitched backwards, a bloody crater where the tattoo on her cheek had been, most of her brain following the projectile out through the back of her skull. Tamworth seized the trigger even as she fell, attempting to keep up the rate of fire, only to be cut down in turn, what looked like a bolter shell ripping his ribcage apart.
- Later that day, some other irregulars are killed as the ork forces retreat past Cain's force's location. Cain notes multiple times how much it would suck for them to die now after getting so close to safety. For all of the aforementioned, that DID happen.
For the Emperor
- While trying to get the Tau diplomats out of the city in order to avert a war, Cain's group runs into a group of loyalist PDF. The troops, for entirely understandable reasons, mistake them for traitors and try to arrest them. Cain has them killed. He spends a long moment ruminating on the fact that he spent a great deal more effort trying to spare the lives of the criminals in the company who probably deserved execution than these poor bastards who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's also painfully aware that after spending so much effort to rebuild the 597th's cameraderie and fighting spirit, shooting down a group of well-meaning allies was not the first taste of combat any of them was hoping for."Very good, Lustig. Tell the men..." For once, I was at a loss for words. "Tell the men... I appreciate what they did."
There was a pause. "Yes, sir." - Cain spends his entire life behind his cavalier facade and never makes any meaningful connections or fully entrusts himself to anyone, not even Amberly despite their century-spanning romance. A telling moment is his second conversation with her wherein she gently suggests that he could try being himself. He nearly shits his pants thinking she's a psyker and might have him shot for cowardice, completely missing her point. That's sad.
- His initial thought was even more depressing, if you can believe it. After putting up pretenses for pretty much his entire life, he wasn't even sure there was ANYTHING beneath the mask except for "a quivering little bundle of self-interest".
- A peek Beneath the Mask of Inquisitor Amberley Vail, who for all her competence allows herself to sound very, very tired in the tunnels beneath Gravalax, reminding us that she's just one woman, trying to prevent the entire solar system from sliding into damnation. Cain, and the reader, get the sense that the flighty, carefree attitude she affects is a necessary refuge to keep her from going insane.
- The deaths of Holenbi and Velade in the right after a Hope Spot. They thought they'd escaped the genestealers, but instead they'd been infected to allow the brood to spread.
Caves of Ice
- The first time a trooper dies, the others solemnly have to burn his body to avoid the Necrons learning of their presence.
- While setting off a massive explosion to wipe out the Necrons is mainly a Moment of Awesome, Cain and the Valhalla’s are left solemn by the destruction of the Scenery Porn they were admiring mere days ago.
Cain's Last Stand
- Cain giving his sash to the mortally wounded Donal in Cain's Last Stand. Especially because he wasn't actually mortally wounded, and he survived to be mind-controlled by Varan. Later, he comes in contact with Jurgen which gives him enough clarity to apologize to Cain and shoot himself when he can't break the spell.
- As Cain and his Commissar Cadets are evacuating the Schola Progenium, he looks around his surroundings and notes that the Schola, and in extension Perlia, is the closest thing he's known to a home. Given that he's gone at length throughout his memoirs about how unpleasant the galaxy could be, it's surprising coming from him.
- When visiting the dam at night in Cain's Last Stand, Cain is attacked by a combat servitor and has to take cover behind a convenient pillar. Upon returning to the site the next morning, he sees the names inscribed in the pillar, and realizes it's not just any statue: it's a monument to everyone who died on the March of the Liberator. Once again, he's saved by the people who gave their lives for him. He also has a flash of guilt when he realizes that it's been so long, he can't remember the faces of some of them, even people he knew relatively well.
Vainglorious
- A quick one: Cain notes that Jurgen is literally the only person he trusts. Amberley says she wants to be insulted... but she's also very happy she never had to choose between Cain and her duty.
Unsorted
- Jurgen's Blank nature. Sure, total immunity to the Warp is a nifty trick, but it totally cuts him from other people. They immediately recoil when he's around - okay, the odor probably doesn't help - and tend to forget he exists. He likely was ostracized his whole life for something he had no name for and no way to help. Taking that in account, no wonder he's fanatically loyal to Cain — the Commissar was the first person to treat Jurgen as if he was someone instead of an aberration.
- The Apocalyptic Log of well-meaning governor Jona Warden as he's infected with the Plague of Unbelief.
- Because of the premise of the books, Cain is canonically long dead. This means any unresolved issues he still had while writing his memoirs likely never got resolved, almost all of the other characters we've come to know will have also died either before that or shortly after. Amberly outlived Cain, and since she's the one presenting his secret memoirs to the rest of the Inquisition, it should be obvious that she clearly misses him.
- It is possible that Jurgen is still alive as the rarity of his status means he gets even better juvenat treatment than Cain himself did. But that just means that Jurgen outlived Cain. The old gunner will never find a better Commissar than Cain nor one just as good as Cain. Most newer members of the Commissariat will attempt to emulate Cain's popular image, but they'll always fall short of the man himself.
