When a mortally wounded Blood Angel is judged too valuable to lose, his broken body may be sealed within the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought, that he might fight on for centuries as a towering engine of war. Yet the curse of Sanguinius does not spare even these honoured ancients, and sometimes the mind sealed within the machine slips at last into the Black Rage, reliving the primarch's death from within a body of armoured steel.
Such a Dreadnought becomes a thing of pure and terrible fury. Armed after the fashion of the Furioso with a pair of colossal close-combat weapons, blood talons that shear through ceramite like cloth or thunderous fists that crush tanks, it knows nothing but the compulsion to close and kill. Between battles it must be kept apart, its sarcophagus chained and its rage held in check by the litanies of the Chaplains, for it can no longer tell friend from foe and would strike down its own brothers as readily as the enemy.
Loosed upon the battlefield, the Death Company Dreadnought is a weapon of last resort and grim spectacle alike, a screaming, flailing titan that hurls itself into the densest press of the enemy without care for its own survival. The Blood Angels unleash it only when they mean to break a foe utterly, and they mourn the trapped soul within even as they point it toward the slaughter it now exists only to deliver.
Order of battle
