An Apothecary occupies a position of singular importance within a Space Marine Chapter, for upon his skill rests nothing less than the Chapter's future. Trained in the secret medicae arts of the Apothecarion, he tends the wounds of his battle-brothers amid the fighting, dispensing pain-suppressants, sealing ruptured armour and dragging the salvageable from the jaws of death.
Yet his gravest duty comes when a brother cannot be saved. Every Astartes carries within him progenoid glands that slowly nurture the gene-seed from which new Space Marines are made. When a warrior falls, the Apothecary uses the cruel blade of his reductor to recover these glands before they perish, denying the enemy a genetic prize and ensuring that the fallen live on in the brothers yet to come. To lose a Chapter's gene-seed is a wound that may take centuries to heal.
Marked out by white armour and the array of surgical tools mounted upon his narthecium gauntlet, the Apothecary also oversees the harrowing implantation of new organs into aspirants. He is at once healer, harvester and guardian of the sacred bloodline, walking the battlefield as the keeper of his Chapter's very immortality.
Order of battle
