Sons of Sanguinius: A Blood Angels Omnibus (Warhammer 40,000)

by Guy Haley

‘Caedis?’ said Galt, barely able to believe his eyes. The figure before him was ruddy-skinned. Its bones were twisted, protruding from its flesh. Its muscles were knotted with tension. Fangs protruded from a drooling mouth. His angelic features were broken with rage, his hair falling out in clumps. He held his fingers out in front of him like claws, but it was recognisably Caedis. ‘What have you done to him?’ said Galt. ‘I? I?’ the Spirit of Eternity laughed. ‘It is not I, but you and your debased knowledge that has done this to him, a corruption of the implants he has been given, and from them of the spirit.’

must be confronted. ‘Commander Dante agrees with me that there might be opportunity here too,’ says Corbulo. ‘A manifestation with such parallels to the Flaw demands our special attention. Your vision makes this doubly true. So how it came to you is relevant. Any new symptom is significant. One might be a path to a cure.’

The other Blood Angels do not fear us, as there is no fear in the hearts of the Adeptus Astartes. They honour us, and our sacrifices. But we are also a source of dread. We are the doom that waits. Any brother who does not fall in battle is fated to join our ranks. We are the end of things. All oaths of moment are steps on the road that leads to the cells. To the howls. To Astorath blade.

Astorath had faith in Lemartes, and that was extraordinary. Corbulo wanted to share that faith. Many in his order had called for the Chaplain’s death. Lemartes was an impossibility. The nature of the Flaw meant there could not be a Guardian of the Lost. Only a Redeemer of the Lost. But Astorath disagreed. Astorath stayed his hand. A miracle in itself. There was also the example of Mephiston.

is.’ What motivates Thirst? I could ask. What motivates Rage? Do you see the difference? The distinction between instinct and passion?

approaching the pillar as we are going to. I look back. The Iron Guard column is still marching. I do not think it will stop with the Blood Angels. Reinecker will keep going until he finds oblivion. I wonder if there is heroism in wilful futility.

see the parallels with the Prophet of Blood. I cannot let them trouble me. We command through rage. At a level more primal than language. More powerful. I accept the similarity. It offends me. I direct that fury. This is the way of the Ruinous Powers. Of course there is resemblance. That is the great crime of the Traitors. They were once our brothers. They are degraded, fallen, deserving of nothing but extermination. The similarities between us only exacerbate the monstrosity of the offence.

Auberlen moved his lips again. This time, a word crept out. ‘Daemonic.’ Reinecker released him. He took a step back. He turned to Stromberg. Her face was as grey as his own must have been. But she did not look surprised to have official Imperial doctrine contradicted, and a myth confirmed. ‘You know of such things?’ She nodded. ‘At the schola progenium,’ she began, then trailed off. ‘I never thought I’d see…’ All lies, then. Fundamental tenets he had believed in and fought for his entire life. He had known there could be no theologically acceptable explanation for what was happening on Phlegethon. But he had managed to hold off the full implications of that knowledge. He had worked hard to compartmentalise the terrible sights. Let the Ecclesiarchy explain them when it chose to. As long as he told himself that the Adeptus Ministorum could account for the manifestation, he had been able to keep something

Skarbrand roared, and the moment of transcendence had come. Khevrak felt the hand of his god reach into his core. The warp broke through the real and began his metamorphosis. His bones flowed with change. They grew longer. They thickened. They twisted. They sprouted new growths. Agony speared his frame. His mouth jerked open in shock. His helmet was suddenly too small. His skull was expanding, pushing against the interior. He grunted and struggled to remove the helmet. It was already too late. The pressure built. He heard cracks. He felt movement where none should be. He took a staggering step forward. He clutched his helmet as if he might contain the lethal expansion.

‘Redemption.’ The syllables were hard, jagged as shattered bone. They tumbled away from him. So did meaning. He took another step. It felt like his last. His body pushed against his armour in all directions. Bones turned back on themselves, slicing through muscle and nerves. ‘Redemption.’ Just noises now. No meaning at all. Dhassaran was wrong. There was meaning in what he heard. The meaning was in Skarbrand’s roar. The loss. The grief. There was no redemption there. There was atonement without end for a crime that could never be expiated. There was meaning in the daemon that had manifested among the Blood Disciples.

Even now, even consumed by an anguish that dwarfed what he had undergone in the transformation from mortal to Space Marine, Khevrak’s worship did not waver. He saw the extent of his sin. The act that had made him a Blood Disciple could not be expunged. It was his original sin.

‘Redemption!’ he cried, and the word had meaning again. He understood why Dhassaran shrieked it. He was pleading to continue the quest, to feel all the pain of seeking what would always be out of reach, because to do so was to be the faithful servant of the Blood God. Let him feel despair. Let it fuel his rage. Let him shed blood as never before, consumed by the knowledge that it would never be enough.

He immolated the last of hope. Despair smothered its embers.

Fourth Company and the Death Company. The two curses have swallowed the campaign. Their differences are great. The Black Rage is the distortion of thought and honour. The Red Thirst is the absence of all thought. But they both end in blood. They are both enacted fury.

‘What will be left of us?’ Castigon asked. He spoke as quietly as the growl of the engine and the hammering of the earthquakes allowed. ‘Enough,’ Corbulo said. ‘There will be enough.’ He would not believe otherwise. He could not afford to do so. But the shadows of visions that haunted his rest drew closer, gathering definition. He gazed upon a full company consumed by madness, and the shadow of the future took form.

enemy’s wounds. ‘You will not find redemption here, either,’ Khevrak snarls at me. My bones on both sides begin to grate. Something jabs a lung. ‘I do not seek it,’ I tell him and force the Crozius through his breastplate. I destroy what lies beneath. Khevrak goes limp. His arms fall to his side. He collapses.

am aware of confused fighting around me. One of my brothers in the Death Company falls from the sky. He lands twice. He has been cut in half vertically. We need unity again. We need to see again.

these weapons to honour my armour.’ ‘How so?’ asked Omnio, still firing, his attention fixed on the aliens running and leaping out of the room at the far end of the passageway. ‘When I first transferred to sergeant, I abandoned my trusted friends here for the traditional sword and storm bolter,’ said Gideon. ‘In the next battle, a stray shot from an ork penetrated the sub-thorax pipes and immobilised my left leg. I know when my armour is telling me something. I’ve carried these since.’

shattered its hip, ripping its leg from its body. ‘If you can’t enjoy the artistry of war, then what’s the point of fighting?’ Deino asked nobody in particular.

‘It has an intact seal,’ the Librarian said. ‘Can you open it?’ asked Goriel. ‘We must get inside.’ ‘The ciphers of these locks were usually lines from one of the battle litanies,’ said Calistarius. He began to punch sequences into a keypad beside the door.

‘I can lay those memories to rest, if you wish,’ said Calistarius, sensing the sergeant’s unease.

‘When we return to the Chapter, you and I shall spend some time with the Chaplains. You have carried your grief and fears for six centuries, and the time comes soon when you can let them go. It is not good that you burden yourself with this anguish for so long.’

Calistarius had not known music as a child. The closest that the tribes of Baal Secundus came to orchestration was war drums and pyre dirges. It was only when he had passed the trials of the Blood Angels and become a son of Sanguinius that young Calistarius had learnt of instruments – of flute and riola, violin and helleschord, pantache and cymbal. Before that discovery he had never heard the music inherent in the universe, not until he had been played symphonies composed to emulate the vast array of nature’s moods. He had listened with delight, his mind’s ear turning screeching chords to the howl of the Baal winds, the petulant percussion of tom-toms converted to the drumming foot beats of a carrion-reaper charging over the dunes.

A gift from the Blood Angels – civilisation. Art in all its forms: poetic, literary, visual and military. The legacy of mighty Sanguinius, that the deformed, radiation-scarred vagrants of the deserts could be lifted above their station and turned into demigods. Not just a physical transformation, but a mental, cultural uplifting as well. To be defenders of humanity one needed not only bolters and power armour, but a sense of what was so important that it required the keenest sacrifice. The boons of giant physique and razor-sharp mind were simply part of the exchange. In return, every Blood Angel would give his life and death in service to the Emperor and the Imperium of Mankind he had created.

and time loses all meaning. Like ash ascending on the smoke of a pyre he is lifted up, swept from his weak body into the embrace of a loving god. Brotherhood and belonging, duty and sacrifice, these are values the brood understand. These are virtues to them.

An echo reaches for me: it is the insinuating rasp of M’kar. The image of the daemon prince is also there, fragmented, distorted and multiplied by the crystals of my prison on Solon V. You are of our party without knowing it. You walk the path. Know what you are. Embrace the revel. Enter the palace of wisdom. I denied him. I destroyed him. But his words will not die with him. He has bequeathed a legacy of doubt.

He does not resent Mephiston for replacing his friend Calistarius. He mourns the loss of the one, but the rejection of the other, I come now to understand, flows from the deepest of religious convictions. ‘It is a foundational fact of our existence as Blood Angels,’ Quirinus goes on. ‘Our contest with it is as constant as the beating of our hearts. If our hearts cease to beat, what are we? Dead. If we overcome the Black Rage, what are we? Are we still Blood Angels? How could we be? You have returned from the country of no return. You have returned from the dead. And what stands before me? Death.’

‘Perhaps what you saw on the Eclipse was not a dark omen.’ I snort. ‘Since when do you hold with such foolishness?’ ‘Since one of the greatest Chaplains our Chapter has ever known speaks of hope.’ ‘He is wrong to do so.’ ‘There is no hope?’ ‘There is duty. There is faith. There is death. That is enough.’ Albinus shakes his head. ‘It is not,’ he says, and moves back closer to Quirinus.

Raging, calculating, furious, detached, I stand and spread my wings. They spring from my shoulders, crimson spans of eldritch energy. Their creation is effortless, so strong is the flow of the warp. A dozen metres behind the wounded Phlegethon, the Predator Intemperate retaliates, firing its main gun at the building to my left. I fly forward and up, blade drawn, to a window lit up by another rocket flash. I burst through the frame. I am wrath cloaked in annihilating blood,

There are also brothers for whom there shall be no redemptive battle. They are too deep into the Red Thirst, and shall never surface. For them, what lies ahead is only a shuttered cell on Baal, in the Tower of Amareo. They are not reliving the glorious defence of Holy Terra. They are maddened, rabid. Their mouths are coated with the blood of their fallen enemies, and quenching that thirst is the only instinct that remains to them. They howl for blood, and it does not matter whose. The prayers Quirinus intones at their side are the most mournful. These warriors have fallen to the most cruel facet of our Flaw. They have become the embodiment of the worst of our natures. They are what the rest of us must struggle against being. To descend to that state is an indignity beyond the tragic.

But there is also the Black Rage, and by the blood of Sanguinius, is this not also a blessing? To be one with the memories of our primarch. Is there not something within each of us that welcomes this dissolution? The Black Rage will be our end, but it is also our most vital link to our progenitor. It keeps the fires of righteous vengeance forever burning in our hearts.’

Quirinus thinks he knows what he is fighting. He thinks he can use the tactics he would against a common psyker: overwhelm through incessant, multiple, changing attacks; disrupt concentration; prevent any move to the offensive. This is sound strategy, and the Reclusiarch is a fierce warrior. But he does not know me. At so many profound levels, he has no idea what I am. And now his ignorance tires me. I have had enough. I sink my will into his own with the force and speed of a venomous serpent. He staggers away, clutching his head, his weapons forgotten.

hold Quirinus’s legs, keeping him immobilised while the Sanguinary Priest speaks to him. Albinus calls his name. He entreats Quirinus to remember who he is, when he is, and to come back to his brothers.

Albinus recites the Litanies of Sanguinary Intercession, praying for Quirinus’s deliverance from the temporal fugue.

the Chaplains who guide their charges through the finality of the Black Rage, and we have no Chaplain. Dantalian, who preached to Fourth Company, died on the Eclipse of Hope. And now we are losing Quirinus. He believed not wisely but too well. The shock of the truth has destroyed him.

immolated flesh. The fires have burned themselves out. There is a meaning to this smoke. It is the smoke of afterwards. It is the smoke of finished. It is the smoke of the only form of peace our era knows, the peace that comes when there is no one left to die.

Nord’s hairless scalp was bare except for the faint tracery of a molly-wire matrix just beneath the flesh, implanted to improve connectivity with his psychic hood. And

The scars and the bionic had stayed with him all these years, a reminder of the lesson. Arrogance kills; humility endures. The sword, sir.

joining the Sanguinary Priesthood, does his grip falter. Only here is his soul bent to a task other than the letting of blood or the suppression of the choler that makes them glorious, or the search, the fruitless search, for something like a cure.

He has been born into an age of iron, and the makers of this thing lived in an age of gold, but that is fate, and to wish otherwise is a very great sin, among the greatest.

We feel too much, he thinks; that is the clot in our souls.

Yet he knows that passion is also their majesty, and he would not trade it, not for the savagery of the Wolves, nor the nobility of the sons of Macragge, nor the steadfastness of Dorn’s praetorians.