Index Astartes: Dark Angels

Origins

Of all the planets of the galaxy that could have been witness to the occasion, the pod bearing the infant First Primarch fell on the Death World of Caliban. When the child not yet named Lion el'Jonson landed, Caliban was a vast expanse of jungle filled with the deadly Great Beasts and valiant knights struggling against the monsters.

The Primarch landed in the forest, but was soon after found by the Order, the greatest knightly organization on Caliban. The man who found the Lion was a prominent Order figure known as Luthor, and Luthor was the first man who tutored the young Primarch in the ways of war and leadership.

Luthor gazed at the young boy who had, surprisingly, endured the perils of the forest. Hezel did, too, but with more suspicion; then Luthor's fellow knight raised his spear.

"Stop!" Luthor exclaimed. "What are you doing?"

"The child has the stink of the wild on him," Hezel replied. "Darkness in his heart."

"He does not," Luthor stated. "And I will prove it."

But though the Lion paid full attention to those lessons, other ideas, grander ones, began consuming him, leading him to doubt the universality of the knightly ethos of Caliban. The remnants of the memories the Emperor had implanted in him led the Lion to realize how pathetic the knights' technology really was, and after going from the forest to the knights, he desired to take the line further. He applied his genetic genius to invention and craft, creating new weapons and new industries to uplift Caliban. Luthor was the Lion's right arm throughout this period, which ended with the knights beginning to win their first true victories against the beasts, beating back the jungle for the first time in millennia.

Much of the Order saw this as a chance to win Caliban for what they saw as civilization, to unite the world. The Lion, however, had no interest in immediately waging a massive and bloody campaign to politically unify the humans of Caliban. He did not even truly desire to drive the Great Beasts extinct.

He had grown to admire the Great Beasts, in a sense, as ideal killing machines; and he decided to use them. The Lion left Luthor and the Order behind and embarked on a pilgrimage into the heart of darkness. He visited the beasts, and communicated with them. It is unknown exactly what transpired in the depths of Caliban's jungle during this year; but el'Jonson came out of it with a new wealth of knowledge about the workings of the world. He had grown to understand the ways of the Spiral Creator, the nexus known as the Warp.

When the Lion returned, he began the construction of new engines, new buildings, new weapons, each heralding the beginning of a new golden age. The raw power of the Warp was strong within Caliban, and the Lion dictated the world to largely remain as it was. There would be no grand revolution and overthrow of the natural order; it would be integrated within this greater society.

Among some, the First Primarch's seemingly arbitrary decisions bred resentment. The slaves whose blood was needed for progress to continue were one such group. But it was Luthor, who continued to play the loyal second-in-command, who most doubted his master's decisions, though he kept this secret. For all that it had brought greatness to Caliban, the Lion's pilgrimage had forever separated him from his oldest friend.

The Lion did not only focus on the energies of the Spiral Creator, but also on the creatures that were parts of it. The weaker ones were used within the engines, and the stronger became advisors and lords. It was such a "daemon" that warned el'Jonson of his father's upcoming arrival, and showed him the wrath that would fall upon Caliban if the Lion's intentions remained known.

The Lion responded quickly, by hiding - via sorcery and digging - his machines and allies. So when the Emperor arrived, nine years later, he was only slightly disturbed by the Warp around Caliban.

And Lion el'Jonson rejoined his Legion.

The Great Crusade

The First Legion, the Dark Angels (as the Lion quickly renamed them in honor of a dream of his), were more exposed than the Lion's father to the fullness of what he was doing with Caliban. They accepted it more readily, too. Yet little of Caliban's Warp-tech filtered down through the Legion, for fear of excessive notice. Magnus the Red could flaunt his powers and be hated for it; the First Legion would keep their business to themselves.

The First Legion hewed relatively closely, too, to the Emperor's proposal of a hundred thousand Marines per Legion. There were about ninety to ninety-five thousand Dark Angels sweeping through the galaxy.

Ironically, though he knew his father would kill him for his full beliefs, the Lion in many ways agreed with the Imperial Truth. He trusted in humanity's bright future, if only it would shed its weaknesses. This caused much friction with the cynical Rogal Dorn. It also caused issues in the Lion's relationship with softhearted Vulkan. Vulkan believed that the changes to humanity the Lion trusted in were too much, remaining too wrapped in his own primitive morality to appreciate progress - even the brighter side of progress that the Lion revealed during the Crusade (though, to Vulkan's credit, his complaints also had to do with the entirely valid suspicions of what the Lion was doing in secret).

The Warp was - the Lion knew - the sole way of transcending entropy and, ultimately, the end of the universe. Roboute Guilliman particularly desired the Lion's designs for this, and received some of them, though after the Ultramarines stayed loyal in the War of Discovery they unwisely disposed of most such devices. But the Lion looked to a more specific picture than the whole universe in most things - as far as he was concerned, the end of human civilization might as well have been the end of the universe.

Magnus the Red and Ferrus Manus were also close allies of the First Primarch. Magnus admired the Lion's efforts with integrating the Warp and technology, though he considered his own studies purer. The Lion, for his part, found Magnus' path quite similar to his own, if less application-focused. Ferrus approached from the opposite side - his mechanical work was what the Lion combined with Magnus' theory.

These friendships did not change the fact that Lion el'Jonson was, in general, a solitary figure. He did not make those friendships he made easily, and was more focused on his work than on people. When he chose to, though, he could be a masterful diplomat - indeed, his amazing skill in keeping the entirety of his work secret from the Emperor attests to that fact. Many suspected him of hiding something; but those who suspected didn't care, and those who cared didn't suspect.

The Dark Angels' doctrine of war was fairly generalist: as the First Legion, they had for a long time had elements to fulfill various strategic roles, and while they grew integrated into the Imperial war machine over time, they remained traditions in various forms of combat. The only one among them that the Lion restricted was that of the Dreadwing, warriors armed with ruinous archaeotech. In part this was because he opposed the use of technology that was not fully understood, and because he believed that modern technology was in practice superior, but mostly it was the desire to avoid the destruction those arms caused. The Dark Angels were soldiers beyond compare, and their function was to be more precise than mere Exterminatus.

Nevertheless, they took pleasure in their status as a problem that the worlds they brought into the Imperium could not understand. The people of Grymm's Landing, one such planet, called Lion el'Jonson the Sunbreaker, for killing, in a duel, of a powerfully psychic xeno tyrant that claimed to be the only reason the local star rose daily; the name stuck, at first as an in-joke among the Astartes and later as a title the Lion was proud of. Other worlds required greater effort to take; the techno-feudal planet Haisegraith, for a long time a thorn in the Imperial Army's side, fell to the Dark Angels' assault when the Lion found a way to turn the lords' technology against them before accepting a desperate surrender.

Worlds the Dark Angels conquered were, after a brief but severe tithe of people and materials, usually integrated into the Imperium in the ordinary way. The Lion did his best to emulate the methods of Primarchs, such as Guilliman, who successfully changed planets for the better in their conquests. The Dark Angels did not permit ignorance and superstition to remain; but neither were they unnecessarily brutal. On Haisegraith, most of the local aristocracy - particularly destructive and possessed of several odd, evil traditions - were themselves taken by the Dark Angels as servants and sacrifices, after which the world was rebuilt according to normal Imperial precepts. Haisegraith remained a loyal Imperial world although, during the War of Discovery, Chaos cults instigated a brief civil war. Other planets, such as Grymm's Landing, became secret Dark Angel recruiting worlds, with small bases of the Legion. That being said, here secrecy was relative; it was known the First Legion had backup homeworlds, although some of their influence on those planets stayed hidden.

As for Caliban itself, the Dark Angels' true homeworld remained a place of jungles and of technology. Luthor, who the Lion left in charge as he departed on the Crusade, was more or less the governor - except when the Primarch visited, which was often. The Legion's second-in-command grew increasingly more cynical and more doubting of the Legion's vision with time, though assistance from some loyal psykers kept this uncertainty from the Sunbreaker's awareness, in an ironic inversion of what the Lion was doing to the Emperor. In truth, though, Luthor was looking back to his knightly upbringing with nostalgia.

The Lion consulted little with daemons and beasts during the Crusade, for fear of being noticed. The few communications he received instructed him to prepare for rebellion, but politics was never the First Primarch's focus. Though he recognized rebellion was inevitable, he put it off. After all, if nothing else, the Great Crusade's actions drove humanity in the very direction that the Lion preferred to move in.

But endings circled. On the Ocean World of Ireo, a secondary recruiting world for the First Legion, a Squad of the Alpha Legion uncovered an Ordixenus battle engine that Alajos of the Ninth Order was constructing. Misunderstandings escalated, ending in the death of the XX Legionnaires. Yet Alajos was paranoid that the incident would be revealed (moreover, a number of his subordinates, including Company Champion Corswain, sympathized with their foes); and indeed, his communiqué to the Lion on the subject was intercepted.

The news put the Sunbreaker on the edge. By this point, he was trying to limit his contact with the ethereal in the belief that it was destroying the purity of his purpose. Yet now, those doubts placed in deep storage (never to be retrieved), he consulted a messenger of the Spiral Creator for the first time in years. The news was welcome – Lorgar and Rogal Dorn were leading a massive rebellion against the Emperor. Even though El'Jonson suspected his rival would cause it to collapse, he directed his fleets toward the Istvaan system.

The Great Betrayal

Meanwhile, Luthor too had received Lorgar's invitation. He took it in a different way. Gathering a few of his closest associates, he led his own fleet – crewed almost entirely by humans – to the Isstvan system. By this point, he was quite insane, but determined to stamp out Chaos nevertheless.

"I am no saint. I am not, by your measures, even a good man. How many I have tormented to death by my own hand, or enslaved for life to feed the wheels of progress? Some of this I did to keep my distaste secret, but I did it anyway, rather than come to the Emperor with my concerns. I have been a monster, but I have this, at least: that I know how monstrous I have been. Perhaps I cannot be redeemed. But I will do my best to obliterate my greatest mistake."

- Luthor

By himself, Luthor would have simply been obliterated by the combined forces of the discoverer Legions, as Lorgar called the congregation. His ships were weaker than the Lion's, Warp-linked only slightly as they were, and were moreover significantly outnumbered. But both Warp travel and void warfare are unpredictably slow actions, and Luthor's associates were able to convince him to keep the fleet hidden at a distance from the conflict.

Meanwhile, the Lion met the other rebelling Primarchs. He was surprised that Vulkan had had the guts to join, and shocked that Magnus hadn't even been invited; but he got along with most of his present brothers regardless. Unfortunately, they didn't all get along with each other. Jaghatai Khan and Angron fired on each other, as did Ferrus Manus and Perturabo. Meanwhile, Alexis Polux of the newly-renamed Doom Fists started a counter-rebellion.

It was at this point that Luthor struck.

There was confusion, war raging for about a week before the nearly-demolished forces Luthor led was forced to retreat; but damage was severe, even in the First, which was one of the least-affected Legions. All in all, of ninety-one thousand Dark Angels, about four thousand betrayed their Primarch (most of those having been allied with Luthor from the beginning), and another two thousand died at Isstvan. The machinery that the Lion had prepared for the battle on Terra was also diminished.

Some Dark Angels, including Corswain, had flown to Caliban when summoned to Istvaan. Allied with the thousands Luthor had left behind, they staged a planetwide revolution. The symbols of the Lion's reign of progress were defaced, his forges were demolished, and his forests were devastated. Unlike most of his allies, which headed for Terra, Luthor flew his customized Spiralship to Caliban, where he led his fellow traitors in creating a defense against his brothers. Worst of all, because they knew they would be defeated in a fair fight, they created the Obsidian Imperative.

As they did so, the Sunbreaker was forced to put off the reclamation of his homeworld in favor of joining Lorgar's Second Fleet in the charge towards Terra. The fleets were initially separated due to astropaths' restrictions, but the division was meant to be only nominal. Instead, endless delays set the Second Fleet far behind schedule. Their flight was endlessly slowed, and in the end, they arrived at Terra when the battle was already over.

The First Fleet had come first, and it had lost. Perturabo had died and the other three present Legions were devastated. As the Lion had expected, Rogal Dorn had failed. Now the time had come for him to prove he was better. Soon, the battle to prove mankind's future was bright would begin.

It did not go as expected.

The battle-engines, them whom the ignorant Imperials called daemon-engines, pounded on the Palace's walls; but the response was severe. Lorgar ignored much of the Lion's advice, and instead tried to cut out the middleman and contact with the Warp Gods. The Lion, however, knew the inherent deceitfulness of these beings where Lorgar did not. So the Word Bearers fought alongside the Iron Hands more often than with the Dark Angels.

As for the First Legion, though el'Jonson disliked turning the massive energies of the Spiral Creator into simple destruction, he did so nevertheless. The cousins Zahariel and Nemiel particularly distinguished themselves during the war, together captaining the Beast of Caliban, a titanic machine formerly belonging to the Primarch himself. Meanwhile, the Lion corralled the Pink Swarm, an ooze-like relic from the Golden Age of Technology that had been further augmented with the power of the Spiral Creator.

These and other great machines – greater than anything the Loyalists had, even among the Raven Guard, for Mars was in a state of civil war – initially succeeded in weakening the walls; but gradually the Imperial Legions began to stabilize the situation. And as the Lion began to plan further breakthroughs, the unimaginable happened.

The World Eaters disappeared, without either warning or explanation. Without them, the positions of the Beast of Caliban, among others, became indefensible. The Lion rushed to his Beast, Aslanai - the greatest of the many swords he'd designed - in hand, but was too late to prevent either its destruction by Leman Russ or Nemiel's death. Lorgar became increasingly unapproachable, doubting a successful end to the siege. Ferrus, for his part, tried to exploit Aurelian's fragile state, both for personal gain and in the service of the war, while assisting the Lion's efforts; but these attempts backfired.

The Lion and Ferrus together created a new plan for assault, one that could win the war before other Legions converged on Terra. They broke through the walls, and in the corridors of the Imperial Palace Lion el'Jonson met Roboute Guilliman. The duel lasted for hours, as battle raged at low intensity around them. In the end, the Lion stabbed Guilliman with Aslanai, putting him on the brink of death; but he failed to finish the deed, for Guilliman's response caused the Sunbreaker to briefly lose consciousness, and both Primarchs were carried off by their men.

"Crippled? I am not crippled. I suspect that a Primarch will always recover, unless they die. But I am wounded, yes, Ferrus. I'll have to spend some time recovering… tinkering… you know. Please keep Lorgar in line, and don't do anything stupid."

- Lion el'Jonson

The battle could still be won; but with the Lion injured, Ferrus Manus chose to act quicker than was wise. Taking control of several among the First Primarch's engines without permission, and adding them to his own, Ferrus tunneled a path to the Throne Room itself, the control center of the Astronomican and the War; but the daemonic natures were fickle, and only Lorgar himself reached the room. There, he killed the Emperor and Fulgrim, at the cost of his own life. Unfortunately, this accomplishment came at a huge cost in men, and both Ferrus Manus and Kor Phaeron – Lorgar's replacement as leader of the Word Bearers – chose to flee.

Cursing them, Lion el'Jonson recognized that, in the end, he had no choice but to follow suit. The Sunbreaker was the last of the Discoverer Primarchs to depart Terran orbit, and it is said that he spent the last minutes before the Warp jump alone, in his sanctum, watching the world where he was created and to which he would never return.

Humanity's destiny would have to wait.

The Escape

The Lion split his Legion in the escape from Terra. There were approximately fifty thousand loyal Astartes left in it after the difficult siege warfare on Terra. Of these, el'Jonson sent five thousand to Fenris, the Space Wolves' homeworld, hoping to teach the Sixth Legion a lesson; those five thousand almost all abandoned their post before or on the Wolves' arrival. Five more thousand, led by Zahariel, were sent directly to the Eye of Terror, along with some of the Lion's most advanced devices. This was a failsafe, a last-case scenario for the case of everything else's loss.

"Build the perfect world by my arrival," the Lion is said to have told Zahariel then.

The rest of the Legion, under the Lion's command, was tasked with ensuring the security of those parts of the galaxy outside the Eye of Terror which could be salvaged. Their first target was recovery on their homeworld of Caliban; along the way, they encouraged Chaos Cults on a few other planets and reconquered two of their secondary recruiting worlds.

Then they arrived at Caliban. And Luthor fired on them.

The first volley came as a shock, even though the Lion had received no communication from Caliban for some time. And the fallen Angels making up Luthor's forces, despite plenty of hesitation, were fully willing to kill their brothers. Needless to say, though, the Lion was just as willing.

The bombardment went on and on. There was response fire, and many Dark Angels died, but careful application of force ensured that Luthor's capacity to wage war was diminished without any lasting harm to the planet itself. And then, just as the Fallen – as they were beginning to be called – were on the brink of extermination, Luthor triggered the Obsidian Imperative.

Caliban exploded into an asteroid field. But Luthor's true evil was not in that. Using his knowledge of the Spiral Creator, the lord of the Fallen turned the foundation of reality on itself. Caliban became a dead zone for the Warp. Every daemon within the Dark Angel fleet was instantly erased from the Warp. The loss is difficult to describe in words, but it suffices to call it devastating. The vast majority of the spaceships stopped working for one reason or other, as did almost all weaponry, but such momentary weakness the Lion repaired. Yet, more, Luthor's actions fundamentally damaged the fabric of the universe, erasing ideas themselves from the Warp.

The Lion gazed at the readings, on a gauntlet that he had designed as a failsafe specifically for an eventuality similar to this - though the scale was not one he could have foreseen.

A dead zone. A splotch of terrible nothingness beyond space. He was not truly a psyker, but even he could sense it. So much devastation….

What had he done? How could he have led his father to this? Had there ever been a possibility that Luthor could see the Spiral Creator as he had? Lion el'Jonson did not know; but this… this was surely the worst of both worlds.

On one of the asteroids, Luthor and his Inner Circle meant to escape. The Lion and a few of his closest associates teleported onto that asteroid after determining it, using one of the few non-Warp-linked mechanisms on the Invincible Reason. They met the traitors in a titanic battle, one that eventually exploded the asteroid yet again. When the shells settled, three survived: the Lion, Astelan (a Chapter Master, and one of the best swordsmen in the Legion, he had been terribly scarred by Corswain before killing him), and Luthor. The Sunbreaker prepared for the executioner's swing before looking into Luthor's eyes and realizing that the madman wanted to die. A moment later, el'Jonson had decided to take Luthor with him, as a source of information about the completed war, and perhaps a source of pain for those sorceries that required it.

Another moment later, Luthor was on the ground, dead from a concealed poison pill – one final insult to the honor of the First Legion.

The Long War

Many former members of the Mechanicum fled, after the War of Discovery, to the Eye of Terror. For a brief period of time they formed a series of techno-empires, but within a couple of centuries all had dissolved into the domains of the Iron Hands, the Salamanders, the Iron Warriors, the White Scars, and – most of all – the Dark Angels.

The Lion himself retreated to the Eye soon after the battle of Caliban. He almost immediately joined forces with Zahariel, who had taken a world known only as The Rock and turned it into a wondrous Spiral-based factory. It was both beautiful and functional, and Zahariel's esteem – already high – immediately rose enough for him to become one of the Legion's leaders.

The Lion himself continued to direct the running of the Legion and its wars in the name of Chaos Undivided, always seeing the Spiral Gods as untrustworthy, yet powerful, allies in the war for enlightenment. Early in M32, he used his strange devices to ascend to a Daemon Prince, a geared serpent that continued to direct the running of the Rock and its progress into the mysteries of the Warp, but largely ignored the wider galaxy. Zahariel and Astelan, and later other Warband leaders such as Azrael and Balthasar, took over the running of the military aspects, leading many attempts to defeat the enemies of the future.

Of course, no grand victory has yet been achieved; but many smaller triumphs did occur. In late M33, the Kulgotha system was the scene of a titanic war between Zahariel's forces and the entropic enemies of hope, the cloaklike Hrud xenos. Though Zahariel sacrificed himself in the process, his followers destroyed the infestation and claimed the productive, mineral-rich system for themselves. In the Battle of Petsembe (551.M37), the Thousand Sons attacked Petsembe, a recruiting world of the Dark Angels. The local human defenders and small garrison managed to hold them off for almost a year, long enough for the Dark Angels to arrive; soon after, the Fifteenth Legion retreated. Production, however, never returned to prewar levels, and eventually Astelan allowed Salamanders to gain the world as part of a peace treaty. At Bane's Landing, Kranon of the Crimson Slaughter warband met Balthasar of the Dark Angels in a debate on whether Chaos was the means or the end. Predictably, violence erupted; but Balthasar easily took the upper end and killed Kranon personally, conclusively winning the debate.

That is not to deny that the Dark Angels have known their share of defeats. On Altid 156, Chapter Master Zeriah's Altid Crusade came to a crashing end. The Alpha Legion laid an elaborate trap, the product of years of effort that led to Zeriah being surrounded by twelve of the enemy Legion's finest warriors. Still, Zeriah was armed with the hyperblade Iridescent, and he killed all twelve before finally being lost, his assault collapsing without him.

Yet even in defeats like this, the Dark Angels hold to their ideals: uplifting humanity, at any cost. Some are not ready for the dawn of the new age, but the Dark Angels know no other path to eternity exists; and so they fight on for the good of all, whether their enemies know it or not.

Organization

Before the War of Discovery, the Dark Angels were divided into eighty-five Chapters, each of which contained slightly over a thousand Marines. The War destroyed some of those chapters and diminished many others. From both slaves and volunteers, the Lion has succeeded in replenishing the ranks, even lifting them up to approximately a hundred and ten Marines. The Chapter structure has become fluid, but the Eighty-Five are still intact. Of those, the Summit of Five is supreme – the five first Chapters, whose leaders are seen as the Lion's closest advisory body. Currently, their leaders are, in order, Astelan, Sammael, Azrael, Yafrir, and Balthasar. Other warbands operate outside the structure of the Eighty-Five; those are smaller, and often their leaders are young and ambitious, seeking to eventually achieve a rank among the Chapter Masters. Overall, about ten thousand Dark Angels are outside the Eighty-Five, around fifteen thousand are loyal to the Summit of Five, and the rest belong to the other Chapters. The largest Chapter, the First, numbers around four and a half thousand Marines; the majority contain nine hundred to a thousand.

"What about the possessed? Kill them. Flesh and ethereal flesh should meld in far subtler ways than blunt daemonic superposition, and they're depressing besides."

- Interrogator Belial

There are no Techmarines among the Dark Angels; every single Marine is expected to be competent in industry. Almost all are, but it isn't as if those who aren't are persecuted. Mindless killers are rarer than in other Legions, but they are acknowledged to have their uses. Those Marines who specialize in psychic research and development are known as Interrogators. Making up about three percent of the Legion, Interrogators are known as such for their frequent sadism, but taking joy in their actions is not a prerequisite.

Most psykers are also Interrogators; but many Chapters also maintain a special Battle-Librarian department, containing maybe a quarter of a percent of the Legion, devoted to the use of the Warp directly in battle. And, of course, some Sorcerors rise to leadership positions and stay there. Apothecaries make up a percent to two of the Dark Angels; they fuse their knowledge of man and machine, and work together closely with the Interrogators for such things as bionic and ethereal implants. They are generally respected more than the Battle-Librarians, but less than the Interrogators; yet in general, the Dark Angels have maintained a sense of brotherhood more than many Chaos Legions, and most Legionnaires have respect for most others.

In this fashion, the First Legion has maintained its power and its mission through the millennia, preparing for the next push to Terra.

Combat Doctrine

The Dark Angels are not merely a combat organization. In general, they conquer worlds to enlighten the populace, as well as to create another Dark Forgeworld. They never leave willingly, but the fragility of many of their systems mean they leave all too often nevertheless.

On the offensive, the Dark Angels begin their attack via scrapcode and other such infiltrations, breaking apart the enemy's ability to fight. They join this with propaganda broadcasts that explain the depths of the Spiral Creator, though not in too much detail – the populace must be kept be alive, after all, and that means flooding it with the power of the Warp only slowly. Xenos, too, are encouraged to join Dark Angel conquests (in a subordinate role), though few do. In any case, the broadcasts' goal is more to inform than to persuade. After an immediate assault on enemy strongholds, the Dark Angels flood the planet, bringing Chaos into the planetary psyche and eventually turning it into a Daemon World. (Indeed, sometimes this step precedes all the others; the risk of discovery by the Twentieth, though, is severe). Until the moment of transformation, great industrial centers are lifted at the former sites of the enemy strongholds; underground resistance in the countryside is ignored until the forges meet and cover the entire world.

Such a slow process means the Dark Angels are often forced to defend what they have taken. Usually, the enemy is counter-attacked with scrapcode and daemons; then, the First Legion retreats to its strongholds, but also wages mobile warfare. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the enemy is never safe. Nevertheless, even a failed attempt at invasion can significantly damage economical output; so the Dark Angels use vast, Warp-affected but not Warp-possessed, ships to beat back many invasions long before they reach the surface. The result is that Dark Angel planets tend to be less self-sufficient and more dependent on nearby allies than those of most allies, but also more potentially powerful when interlocking in such a great design.

Homeworld

The Dark Angels' first homeworld was Caliban. A planet of dense forests, it was before the Lion's arrival at war with itself: knights against beasts, needless conflict without end. Society was stagnant at a medieval level. Lion el'Jonson joined the two sides to create a haven for the combination of sorcery and technology. The downside to this was, of course, that progress was bought by the blood of innocents; but the Lion knew the success of the human race was worth any short-term sacrifice.

Luthor and his Inner Circle destroyed Caliban at the end of the War of Discovery, and moreover poisoned the space around it. The Legion was rebuilt in a planet Zahariel renamed to the Rock. The Rock is far more mechanical than Caliban had ever been, but its spirit is just as fierce. It is a place of circles rotating within circles, bound together by tendons of both daemonic and realspace flesh. The precise geometry makes little sense, but in general, the place resembles a handleless cup in shape, with the hollow interior a docking bay for spaceships. There are no trees on the Rock, but there are animals, most of them transformed by endless mutation. They feed on each other and the sheer power of the Warp.

Beliefs

The Dark Angels between that only Chaos can save humanity from itself, both in terms of physics and in the societal sense. There is evidence that, before the Great Betrayal, the Lion thought of this as a depressing burden, and tried to wean himself off what he recognized as an alienating creed; but when war broke out, he dedicated his full resources towards victory, and once more embraced the darker aspects of Chaos. Luthor, it should be noted, initially shared the Lion's beliefs but ultimately came to the conclusion that they were inhuman.

The Dark Angels' relationship with the Chaos Gods is complicated. Basically, they are regarded as allies, but not openly worshipped, and their daemons are consulted but never trusted. Individual engines can be dedicated to a god, but individual Legionnaires should not be – though some join a religion nevertheless.

Gene-seed

The Dark Angels' gene-seed is a mess. Most gene-lines have every organ but the Omophagea functioning (eating enemy brains is in any case seen as barbaric), but many also add entirely new ones that may or may not function well, as well as bionic and ethereal enchancements. The Lion himself no longer donates gene-seed for the creation of new Marines himself, but many Dark Forgeworlds have created their own means of mass-producing it.

Battle-cry

Through time, the Dark Angels have maintained their original battle-cry: "Repent! For you die today!" During the Great Crusade, "Repent" was often replaced with the less religious "Comprehend".

999.M41

Lion el'Jonson slid through the cycles of his Legion's world, for once slithering out of its mechanisms. It was not that he was incapable of leaving the world, but if he remained too long outside, or on the exterior surface of, the Rock -

No, he would call it what it was, if through gritted fangs. The Chalice of Khaine - the true Chalice of Khaine, crafted with the blood of xeno gods, Khorne and Slaanesh commingled within it, Nurgle and Tzeentch attracted by Zahariel's arrival. His conquest. His prison.

But he would have to risk braving its walls now. As his head restructured itself at the antipodal point, the very center of the chalice's apparent stand (not that it was possible for a non-daemon to observe its full majesty), he saw the twinkling maelstroms of the Eye of Terror as he never had before, through the newly completed Monocle of the Lost, and beyond them the stars of realspace. He felt them pulling him, in a -

A glint allowed him to focus, to dodge the risk of losing himself for now. And he could feel, now, the nature of that speck. What he had suspected for the past millennium was confirmed at last. The purging of Caliban had not been completed; the Lord Cypher still lived.

Once, that knowledge would have caused him to scream in frustrated rage. But now, he held onto it as an ember of hope. For the Obsidian Imperative had done far worse than he had ever believed to his own parabiology, and the ascension to daemonhood had only made the matter worse. And among all the answers he had found in the millennia since, he did not find a cure that he could accept. If he did not find one soon, then he would die; perhaps something of him would remain, but he could not entrust everything to a remnant or reincarnation whose nature he had no clue to.

The Lion was almost resigned to that now. Ironic, that he was in a sense reclaiming some of the Order's culture, back from lost Caliban. Which was not to proclaim a false humility.

He was a Daemon-Prince and a Primarch, and he would not die as anything less.

And before he did, he would ensure that both Cypher and Astelan, perhaps the greatest two of his sons to ever live, independent of each other in information and ideal alike, both had the tools to complete humanity's victory.