Baal Secundus is one of the two ravaged moons that circle the red world of Baal, a desolate wasteland of radioactive deserts, toxic seas and blistered rock scarred by an ancient cataclysm whose fires never truly cooled. Beneath a bruised sky the survivors of that long-ago devastation eke out a brutal existence among the dunes, their bloodlines twisted by mutation, their lives a constant war against thirst, poison and one another.
It is from these hardy, desperate tribes that the Space Marines of the Blood Angels most often draw their aspirants. The children of Baal Secundus grow strong in a land that kills the weak without hesitation, and those who prove themselves worthy are elevated from a life of squalor to the ranks of the Emperor's angels, their savage endurance the seed from which noble warriors are grown.
The moon endures as a place of stark and terrible beauty, its ruined wastes littered with the relics of a civilisation destroyed before the Blood Angels ever came. To its tribes, the towering warriors who descend from the heavens to claim their finest sons are figures of awe and legend, saviours who lift the chosen up out of the dust. Baal Secundus asks everything of those born upon it, and gives back only the faint, distant hope of ascension.
The atlas continues
