The Blood Angels

Among all the sons of the Emperor, none were so beloved or so beautiful as the Blood Angels, the noble Chapter descended from the winged primarch Sanguinius. They are artists and warriors both, keepers of a proud and cultured tradition unmatched in the brutal ranks of the Space Marines. And they are doomed, every one of them, by a curse written into their very blood.

To be a Blood Angel is to live in the shadow of a glorious, murdered father and to carry the seed of his death within your own soul. Theirs is a story of transcendent nobility and creeping madness, of angels who paint and sculpt and compose, and who must fight every waking day against the beast that hungers inside them.

The Great Angel

The primarch of the Blood Angels was Sanguinius, and of all the primarchs he was the most extraordinary to behold, for he bore great feathered wings and a beauty that struck awe into all who met him. He was found upon Baal Secundus, a blasted and irradiated moon, where he had grown among mutated tribes and led them out of savagery through sheer nobility of spirit.

Sanguinius was gentle and wise as well as mighty, an angel in truth as much as in appearance, and he was dearly loved by his brothers and by the Emperor Himself. Yet he carried a shadow no beauty could hide: he alone among the primarchs was said to have foreseen his own death, and when the hour came he went to meet it with open eyes.

The Sacrifice at Terra

When Horus fell to Chaos and the Horus Heresy reached its terrible climax at the Siege of Terra, Sanguinius and his Legion held the walls of the Imperial Palace against the traitor host. In the final hours, the Great Angel confronted the Warmaster aboard his flagship, knowing full well that he could not win.

Sanguinius chose to face his corrupted brother regardless, buying precious time and wounding Horus enough, some say, to leave the crack through which the Emperor would later destroy him. The Warmaster broke the angel's body and cast him down, and so Sanguinius died exactly as he had foreseen, a martyr whose sacrifice helped save mankind. His death is the wellspring of everything his sons have since become, their glory and their grief alike.

The Blood-Red World

The Blood Angels take their recruits from Baal and its two moons, Baal Primus and Baal Secundus, a harsh and radioactive system in which only the hardiest and most determined survive. From the mutant clans of the wastelands the Chapter draws aspirants of exceptional will, and remakes them in the image of their fallen father.

Their fortress-monastery upon Baal is a reliquary of ten thousand years of history and art, for the Blood Angels are as devoted to beauty as they are to war. They are sculptors, painters and poets, and their halls are galleries as much as armouries, a standing testament to the cultured soul Sanguinius left them. No other Chapter fights with quite the same tragic grandeur.

The Twin Curses

But the gene-seed of Sanguinius carries a flaw, the price of the primarch's violent death, and it manifests as two terrible curses. The first is the Red Thirst, a mounting craving for blood that rises in the heat of battle and can, if left unchecked, overwhelm a warrior's reason and drive him to savage butchery.

The second and more dreadful is the Black Rage. In the fury of combat a Blood Angel may be seized by the death-memories of Sanguinius himself, reliving the primarch's final duel so vividly that he loses all sense of the present, believing his foes to be Horus and his traitors. Those consumed by the Black Rage are lost to their brothers, trapped forever in the last agony of their father's murder.

The Death Company

Those who fall to the Black Rage are not cast aside but honoured, gathered into a formation known as the Death Company. Clad in black armour marked with red crosses, these doomed warriors are led into battle by the Chapter's Chaplains, who alone can guide their shattered fury toward the enemy.

The Death Company fight with the terrible strength of the primarch's own final battle, feeling neither pain nor fear, and they are unleashed where the fighting is thickest and most hopeless. For them there is no cure and no return; they seek only a worthy death, a release from the madness that has claimed them. When the fighting ends, the Chaplains grant the mercy of the killing stroke to those the enemy did not slay. In this ritual care for the damned lies the whole tragedy of the Blood Angels.

Nobility and Doom

To hold back the curses, the Blood Angels rely upon their Sanguinary Priests, part apothecary and part chaplain, who tend the gene-seed and the souls of their brethren and preserve the sacred blood of Sanguinius. The Chapter's finest warriors form the golden-winged Sanguinary Guard, living images of the primarch who carry his legacy into the fiercest fighting.

There is a melancholy grandeur to the Blood Angels, a sense of noble souls waging a slow and losing battle against their own nature. They are among the most respected Chapters in the Imperium, their heroism beyond question, yet every honour is shadowed by the knowledge that any of them, in any battle, might be the next to hear the death-cry of their father and be lost to the Rage.

The Devastation of Baal

The gravest hour in the Chapter's long history came when the vast bio-fleet Hive Fleet Leviathan, a tendril of the Tyranids, descended upon their homeworld to devour it. In the campaign remembered as the Devastation of Baal, the Blood Angels and every successor Chapter of their bloodline gathered for what they fully expected to be a last stand.

The defence of Baal became a slaughter that came within a breath of extinguishing the sons of Sanguinius forever. Their ancient master, Commander Dante, held the line as the swarm consumed the system world by world, and salvation arrived only at the eleventh hour, with the fleets of the reborn primarch Guilliman and ranks of new Primaris warriors grown from Blood Angels blood. Baal was saved, but scarred beyond healing, and the Chapter's doom was postponed rather than undone. So it has always been for the Blood Angels: they endure, magnificent and cursed, angels forever falling.