The Sabres' Undoing
The warband now called the Crimson Slaughter began as the Crimson Sabres, a Chapter renowned for cold efficiency and rigid devotion to the Codex Astartes. Their ruin came upon the world of Umidia, where they threw themselves against corrupt cults with such savagery that they put the entire population to the sword, certain all had been tainted beyond saving. In doing so they drew the gaze of Khorne, and were cursed to be forever haunted by the spectral voices of those they had murdered, a chorus of the slain that no rite or prayer could quiet.
A Hunger That Cannot Be Fed
Declared renegade and hounded from the Imperium, the Sabres fled into the Eye of Terror, where their torment only deepened and their damnation was sealed. Their Chapter Master, Sevastus Kranon, discovered that the maddening voices dimmed only in the heat of killing, receding a little further with every life taken and every splash of gore upon their armour. And so a Chapter built on discipline became a warband of relentless murderers, renaming itself the Crimson Slaughter and taking to endless war not for conquest but simply to purchase a few moments of silence.
The Haunted Host
Where the Crimson Slaughter march, reality itself seems to sicken. Witnesses speak of bleeding skies, weeping walls, and phantoms that rise from the shadows to whisper a victim's own sins back to them. Kranon, now called the Relentless, has led his warriors on long and futile quests for artefacts said to lift their curse, and each false hope has bound them only more tightly to Chaos and to the daemons that manipulate them. They remain slaves to the very slaughter that names them, forever killing in the vain hope of a peace that will never come.
Chaos Space Marines
Order of battle
The Crimson Slaughter field the units of the Chaos Space Marines — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Chaos Space Marines formations
Alpha LegionThe Twentieth Legion are the great deceivers of the Long War, a serpentine brotherhood that fights not with open battle-lines but with lies, infiltration, and a thousand hidden hands. Where other Traitor Legions announce themselves in fire, the Alpha Legion unravels worlds from within, working through sedition, sabotage, and mortal proxies long before a single bolter is raised. Their warriors share a single defiant claim, that any one of them may be the primarch Alpharius, and so no enemy can ever be certain whom they truly face.
Black LegionThe Black Legion is the largest and most feared of all the Traitor Legions, forged from the ashes of Horus's own Sons of Horus after their primarch's death. Under the iron will of Abaddon the Despoiler, they cast aside their old colours and old shame, taking black armour to mark a new beginning. Where other legions cling to isolation and old grudges, the Black Legion draws in renegades of every stripe, uniting the fractured hosts of Chaos into a single crusading war-engine bent on the Imperium's utter destruction.
Iron WarriorsThe Iron Warriors are the master siege-breakers of Chaos, grim and pitiless engineers of destruction who reduce fortress worlds to rubble through overwhelming firepower and cold calculation. Once the Imperium's foremost specialists in siegecraft, they nursed a bitter resentment at being spent as siege-fodder while glory fell to others. That resentment curdled into treachery. Today they wage war as a science, favouring artillery, armour and attrition, and they take a grim satisfaction in proving that no wall, no matter how mighty, can stand against them forever.
Night LordsThe Night Lords are the terror-mongers of the Traitor Legions, waging psychological warfare with the same ruthlessness other legions bring to open battle. They strike from darkness in screaming lightning-marked craft, mutilating captives, broadcasting the screams of the dying, and leaving atrocities designed to shatter the courage of the living. To the Night Lords, fear is a weapon sharper than any blade, and a world paralysed by dread is a world already conquered. They fight not for the Dark Gods but for spite, survival and the sheer pleasure of the hunt.
Red CorsairsThe Red Corsairs are the largest renegade warband in the galaxy, a pirate empire that rules the warp-torn depths of the Maelstrom under the iron hand of Huron Blackheart. They are no ancient Traitor Legion but a wound torn open within living memory, born from the ruin of the Astral Claws Chapter after the fratricidal Badab War. Where insular Legions dwindle with the centuries, the Corsairs only grow, swelling their host with every raid, every renegade, and every captive broken and remade in Chaos.
The PurgeThe Purge are nihilist worshippers of Nurgle who cleave to only the darkest facet of the Plague God, despising life in all its forms and seeking not rebirth but annihilation. First appearing in the closing centuries of the 36th Millennium, they became convinced that the galaxy is beyond all saving and that purity can be found only in the sterile silence of death. Wielding poisons and engineered contagions, they wage genocidal war on human and xenos alike, praying for a plague that will scour every living thing from creation.
Word BearersThe Word Bearers are the zealots and prophets of Chaos, the first Legion to bend the knee to the Ruinous Powers and the architects of the entire Horus Heresy. Where other traitors war for vengeance or plunder, the Word Bearers war for faith, spreading the gospel of the Dark Gods across the galaxy with fire, scripture and sacrifice. Their Dark Apostles preach damnation to the masses and summon daemons to fight at their side, and they regard the destruction of the Emperor's atheist Imperium not merely as war but as a holy crusade of conversion.