Baal is a world of rust-red deserts and radioactive wastelands, its surface scoured by rad-storms and its horizon dominated by two poisoned moons, Baal Primus and Baal Secundus. It is the homeworld and fortress of the Blood Angels, the sons of Sanguinius, and from its harsh dominion they draw the mutant-blooded survivors who alone can endure the trials of the Chapter.
The tribes that scratch out life upon Baal's moons are hardy, honourable folk, tempered by generations of hardship into exactly the raw material the Angels require. Those chosen ascend to the great fortress-monastery, a place of soaring gothic beauty and sombre reliquaries, where the gene-legacy of their primarch is both blessing and curse. For with the gifts of Sanguinius come the twin shadows of the Chapter, the maddening Red Thirst and the terrible affliction that drowns a warrior's mind in the memory of their primarch's death. Few Chapters are at once so revered and so pitied, for the sons of Sanguinius carry both greatness and damnation in the same blood.
Beautiful, artistic, and burdened by their own slow doom, the Blood Angels have guarded this crimson world since the earliest days of the Imperium. Its skies have seldom known true peace, but never had they known horror to equal what came from the void beyond.
That horror is recorded in the Devastation of Baal, when a splinter of the great Hive Fleet Leviathan fell upon the system. The Tyranids came in numbers to blot out the stars, intent on consuming the very biomass of Baal itself, and the Chapter was brought to the brink of annihilation defending its ancient home. Baal survived, but only barely, and the scars of that siege will mark both world and Chapter for centuries to come.
The atlas continues
