The Palatine Blades are the Emperor's Children made manifest as living art, master swordsmen who elevate close combat to a discipline as exacting as any craft. Bearing charnabal sabres and clad in ornate, individually fitted war-plate, they move through a melee with a precision that borders on the theatrical, each strike placed with a duellist's exacting care. To fight beside them during the Great Crusade was to watch perfection pursued at the very edge of a blade.
After the Legion's fall, that same artistry took on a sinister cast, for the Palatine Blades came to prize the act of killing as an aesthetic experience in itself, savouring each death as a connoisseur savours a rare vintage. Their duels grew crueller and more elaborate, their perfectionism twisted into a hunger for ever more exquisite sensation. Yet their lethality never dimmed; if anything, the corruption sharpened it, and few enemies who crossed blades with a Palatine survived to speak of the encounter.
Order of battle
