The Sanguinary Priests are an order found nowhere but among the Blood Angels and their kin, warriors who fulfil the battlefield duties of an Apothecary while also serving as custodians of the mysteries peculiar to the bloodline of Sanguinius. It is they who preserve and administer the primarch's own blood, kept within sacred vessels such as the fabled Red Grail, and who preside over the solemn rite of Insanguination by which a mere aspirant is remade into a true son of the angel.
On the field of war a Sanguinary Priest labours to keep his brothers fighting, recovering the precious gene-seed of the fallen so that their legacy may pass on to new warriors, and steadying those around him with the fervour of his faith. His presence lends the battle-brothers about him a measure of the primarch's own transcendent might, driving them to feats beyond ordinary endurance, though the Priests understand better than any the terrible price of the Red Thirst that runs in every vein.
Chief among the order stands the Sanguinary High Priest, and it is these grave and learned figures who carry the greatest hope of the Chapter, for some devote their long lives to the search for a cure to the twin curses of their gene-seed. Between the rite and the scalpel, the Sanguinary Priests hold the Blood Angels together, tending the sacred inheritance that is at once the Chapter's glory and its slow, creeping doom.
Order of battle
