Prophets of Extinction
The Purge are a warband of Heretic Astartes sworn to Nurgle, yet they embrace only the bleakest aspect of the Plague God's nature. Where most of Nurgle's children take a grim joy in decay and the endless churn of rebirth, the Purge see life itself as a corruption to be scoured away. Their origins are deliberately obscured, their ranks likely drawn from more than one fallen brotherhood, but their creed is plain enough: having glimpsed the true horror of the galaxy, they concluded that every civilisation is rotten beyond redemption, and that only death offers anything approaching cleanliness.
The Doctrine of Death
This conviction has made them among the most methodical butchers in the galaxy. They do not raid for plunder or glory, nor do they spread pestilence to nurture new life in Nurgle's name; they wage war to end life utterly and permanently. To that purpose they favour toxins, defoliants, and engineered plagues designed to unmake living matter down to the cellular level, leaving worlds not merely conquered but rendered barren and still. Their campaigns are counted among the great atrocities of the age, snuffing out entire populations in the name of a bleak and total peace.
Too Few for the Task
The Purge know they are far too few to sterilise the galaxy by their own hands, and so they pray without ceasing for the ultimate boon: a pandemic of such virulence that it will extinguish every sentient thing at a single stroke. Their leaders rise and fall as war claims them, their warband waxing and waning across the millennia, but the purpose itself never dies. It endures as a patient and pitiless hatred of existence, a longing for the quiet that will follow the last death, which no defeat has ever managed to still.
Chaos Space Marines
Order of battle
The The Purge 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.
Crimson SlaughterThe Crimson Slaughter were once the Crimson Sabres, a rigidly disciplined Space Marine Chapter whose savagery on the world of Umidia drew the curse of Khorne upon them. Ever since, they have been haunted by the spectral voices of those they slew, a chorus of the murdered that no prayer can silence. Only in ceaseless bloodletting do the ghosts recede, and so the warband slaughters without end, dragging its damnation across the stars in a futile search for a moment's peace.
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.
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.