 It has been said that those who we employ to kill are monsters, but the act of taking a life is a transformative one that changes what a human is, warping it into something altogether horrific. Yet throughout the history of our species, humanity has perennially employed such monsters to do that which some of us cannot, to kill, destroy, maim, butcher, annihilate. The weight of this decision has varied, sometimes it is a last resort, unleashing that which we had previously contained only as a desperate gambit in the hour of greatest need. In others, it is an altogether colder and more calculating thing, a precise employment of those human society has deemed deviant or horrific, in a role that would see their horrible gifts used to our greatest benefit. And some, well, some are monsters of our own creation. The Emperor, beloved by all, crafted many, sculpted by his divine purpose to fulfill preordained roles. This is not meant to be a criticism of he upon the throne, far from it. If anything, he is the inheritor of perhaps the longest standing Faustian pact in human history, that to win, to conquer, one must in turn create monsters to bathe in the blood of one's foes. Empires are built upon the backs of soldiers, and too often have these soldiers been bade to sacrifice their humanity for the sake of a brighter future. Yet, not all monsters are easily discernible. There are obvious ones, yes, the scarred and deformed, twisted and cursed, the dead eyed and murderous, but others, others wear the face of angels, appearing as heralds of something great and good but possessing only murder and destruction in their hearts. These are truly the direst of creations, monsters with the face of men stalking amongst us. Can these twisted things ever change, though? When a monster shuck its fangs, divest itself of its claws and wicked intent, and become something truly different, I shall leave it to history to speak for itself and the history of the subjects of this particular chronicle. Know then that this is a record of the great host, the red drinkers of Baal, the sons of the angel, the ninth legion blood angels. The chronicles of the Unification Wars, scattered and fragmented though they are, are replete with tales of heroism, of battle honors, of great victories, all attributed to the early and yet nameless Liginez-Astati's proto-formations. Though most would only arise to full operational strength after Terran Unity, this did not prevent them from being a decisive addition to the conflict, earning accolades that would far outstrip the soon-to-be-only legendary Thunder Warrior Regiments. The annihilation of the Ethnarch of the Caucasus' Wastes by the 18th Legion, the fires that consumed Oryok fanned by the 17th, and the kneeling of the Nordafric Conclave before the 15th Legion, all were victories whose tales were told the world over, and emblems of which adorned the banners of these Ligians as they first left the cradle of the homeworld to conquer the stars. No such honors were given to the 9th Legion Astati's. Not for them were the privileges of leading at the van, being the first onto the breach or to plant the standard of unity atop the ruins of the enemy's empire. Around them only shadowed whispers and dread rumors float, fragmented accounts from the journals of early Imperial Army soldiers or fellow Astati's. They liken the 9th to a haunting, a Legion of Revenants entering battle under dour, ident tags, communing with no one, leaving only utter devastation in their wake. An inferno in transhuman form, unleashed to burn until only ash remained. Whereas other legions were small in number and had to be limited to precision strikes and rapid engagements, the 9th were easily the largest of these proto-formations, and the first to operate alone. Because of this, they were perennially assigned to the worst war zones Terra could offer, the most radiologically choked and toxicologically ravaged wastelands inhabited only by mutant clans and mad Psyker cults. This was no accident, nor simply by virtue of the Legion's size. It was in a very real way a product of their unique gene seed template. For their genetic building blocks, the 9th would take monsters and make them into angels. Poetic as this statement sounds, it was in fact very real, whereas other legions would simply scrub all the recruitment pools for the slightest hint of genetic deviance and take the finest, strongest, and healthiest recruits. The 9th actively called aspirants from the literal human dregs of Terran society. Whereas the 3rd Legion only accepted the scions of the oldest Terran nobility, the 9th's intake was formed of twisted and debased mutant humanity, scarred by generations of radiological and chemical sicknesses driven into the toxic wastes by what remained of baseline humanity upon the homeworld. The 9th Legion took them all, and from this emerged a breed of Astartes removed in every possible way from the aspirants that first submitted to their bloody surgical knives. Uniformly tall and fair-skinned, they were akin to ancient old earth statues, their pale faces possessing a beauty that seemed to be carved from the oldest and grandest marble at the hands of a sculptor attempting to capture the image of the divine. Few amongst the twisted mutant would survive the ascension process. Astartes' implantation procedures were never easy, and it has been noted as being especially painful and torturous for those submitting to the gene seed of the 9th. Scant few would make it to the ranks, but the 9th, unlike their cousins of other legions, cast an incredibly wide and frankly indiscriminate net across populations no other Legion would have dreamed of attempting intake from. By simple logistics and effort, the ranks of the 9th swelled to eclipse all others. While their presence was barely acknowledged in the records of unity, they became onto a legend to the mutant tribes of Terra. In their wake, they were dogged by what best can be described as a pilgrim caravan. For through the Legion, the twisted human waste of the planet saw a chance at truest salvation, an escape from a life of cancers and diseases, of shame and constant degradation. At first no more than a mob, this pilgrim train quickly became more organized, with red, rag-clad holy men emerging to stoke an apparently religious devotion to the 9th Legion. Shell casings from the bolters of lion Astartes, fragments of armor, scraps of penance, these little lost things became relics, objects of devotion to the truly desperate who only wished to escape their pitiful lives. The Red Brothers, as these clerics became known, used their station to herd their flocks into the open arms of the Legion's apothecaries, who readily accepted this arrangement for the easy and constant supply of manpower it provided. Should such acceptance of overt religious devotion strike one's students as odd, given that the Imperial truth formed the basis of the Great Crusade, worry not. The instant the Emperor proclaimed all religion and superstition outlawed, the 9th Legion turned their guns without hesitation upon these pilgrim hordes, slaughtering them, with a coldness that would make even the most stone-hearted of their Astartes' cousins bulk. This is perhaps the reason the 9th Legion endured the fires of unity with so few accolades. Their practices and comportment were both cold and unusually brutal, which, in combination with their sinister post-battle practices, marked them out as distinctly other from their fellows, even the Butchers of the 12th Legion and the Murderers of the 8th. It was not for naught that the 9th's first epithet was the Eaters of the Dead. The Emperor, in his wisdom, had granted to all of his Astartes an organ known as the Omophagia, four nerve bundles that served as a spinal extension to the brain that linked the latter with the stomach. Through it, and by means of the Master of Mankind's peerless gene-craft, Astartes can extract memories and experiences from the flesh of those which they consume. Effectively, this allows an Astartes to learn simply through eating. In the 9th, it appears as if this organ was highly overactive, operating at efficiency levels beyond that of their cousins, and allowing new recruits to be brought up to combat readiness simply by feasting on the fallen of any given battlefield. However, it also appears to have inculcated within the 9th Legion a horrid hunger for the flesh or blood of the dead. It went beyond the simple practicalities of training. The sight of the Beatific faces of the 9th, devouring the corpses of Terra's dead, their perfect skin and hair smeared with human blood and human viscera, was a thing of purest horror. Few who balked at such brazen and disgusting Anthropophagy knew of its purpose, or even the existence of the organ that granted it. But this ultimately only served to further isolate the Legion, marking them as monsters of darkest nightmare, cannibal ghouls to be shunned and avoided. The Legion itself cared not, for they knew the purpose of their creation, to be the monsters who fought monsters, to stalk the dark places of the world bringing ruin to those who defied the Emperor and to others would recoil in the face of. Their gifts, to them, were not shunned, but embraced, for it brought them to an operational size and independence no other Legion possessed, the mutations granting them priceless advantages in both combat and recruitment. Rumors, however, were want to spread, and those Astartes' cousins of theirs who had seen the Bloody Angels both in action and aftermath, wondered openly if the 9th were becoming worse than the creatures that they fought, and if action from the highest authority would be needed to curb their excesses. The Great Crusade, that swept outwards from Terra, did so with the 9th Eager to take their wars to the stars, but not for them were the glorious conflicts of the Jovian and Saturnine theatres. Instead, the Emperor, fully aware of the nature of his weapon, bade them make wake for Neptune to hold at bay the Xenos and mutant slaver clans that squatted in the dark reaches of the outer planets. He did so knowing full well the risk this entailed, as it put a full Legion of his Astartes far outside effective lines of resupply and support, and beyond the reach of any Imperial elements save for the isolated pioneer companies of the 5th Legion star hunters. It's a campaign to retake the arcologies of Saturn and the shipyards of Jupiter raged. No word was heard from the 12,000 Astartes of the 9th, neither word of victory nor word of destruction. Yet as forward scouts scutted out system from the volumes of the newly pacified gas giants, what they discovered was simply stunning. Legion space had been purged completely and utterly of enemy elements, and the 9th stood numbers intact, having aggressively recruited and trained new Astartes from the worst human filth of Neptune's moons. This would come to define their early years in the Great Crusade. Again and again the Legion was sent into the darkest pits the galaxy could provide, with no true expectation from those in Imperial command that they would fully survive. They lacked a Primarch yet to be reunited like their cousins of the 16th Legion Lunawolves or 10th Legion Ironhands, and lacked the political clout that came with the popularity of the yet unnamed 13th or 7th legions. They were not seen as dependably solid, like the 4th Legion Corpse grinders, nor notably self-sacrificing, as assumed to be named 18th Legion Salamanders. Rather, they were simply thrown into the dark to rip and tear, to drench the soil of the worst hell holes with the blood of the worst enemies. Theirs was not the bloody fury of the 12th Legion Warhounds, no, their rage was cold, their lack of mercy not fueled by bloodlust, but instead a simple and callous disregard for the value of human life. Few amongst the Crusade would ever welcome their presence upon the battlefield, for they were seen to wreak the foulest monstrosities of old night, a revenant Legion impossible to see the humanity in. Their isolation and insularity deepened, cooling their already icy characters even further. They were still part of the Emperor's plan, a cog in his mighty military machine, but an unloved and even hated one, a tool of bitter necessity that knew no friends. Yet, as fate would have it, salvation approached, on pinions of purest white. The planet of Baal was a harsh thing, a rust-red rock set amidst one of the few stable warp currents near the maelstrom warp event. Once a thriving hub of interstellar trade, the Age of Strife had been particularly unkind to it, as some form of petty civil strife during the depths of old night had become a full-scale atomic conflict, collapsing a fragile ecosystem into rusty wasteland choked with radiation storms. It was to these deserts that the Primarch Sanguinius fell, a comet plummeting into the realms of the scant remnants of humanity that yet eaked out a pitiful existence here. For his earliest days he was alone. These are years he never spoke of, his story only beginning when he presented himself to one of the nomad herds. The contrast must simply have been breathtaking, for the ninth Primarch was truly unique. Legend refers to him as the angel, whilst some argue that this is allegory. It is in fact the pure and simplest truth for Sanguinius was, in aspect, an angel of old. Feathered wings of the purest white protruded from his back, strong enough and large enough to carry him through the air in flight. His countenance was beatific, unscarred by the tumours and mutations that ravaged the humanity of his adoptive homeworld. His rise was effectively preordained. Just as the dregs of Terra had seen the Ninth Legion that bore his genes as angelic saviours to be worshipped, so too did the tribes of Baal come to revere Sanguinius as a god, a divine warrior that drove back the worst of the mutant hordes that preyed upon the nomad tribes. The angel did his best to belay these devotions, but ultimately knew it would be of no use, when his very aspect was so singular and his genetic talents so obvious. When the Emperor arrived, he found not a battle-king or civil leader he had elsewhere, but a god, ill at ease with his position at the head of a dogmatic confederation of the planet's clans. Sanguinius, possessed of psychic foresight that outstripped any imperial pyscher, save a few, had long foreseen his father's arrival, and the potential consequences of it. Alone, he met the Emperor, prostrating himself before the master of mankind in a plea to spare the lives of those devoted to him, knowing full well the severity the imperial truth would meet out upon his adoptive families. The bargain was struck, and as with the homeworlds of the Sixth Legion space wolves and Fifth Legion white scars, the full presence and rate of the Imperium would be spared from Baal, save that which Sanguinius himself would permit. In turn, the angel would depart with his father and serve at his side, and take his place as master of the Ninth Legion. To give the Legion time to muster in its full strength, Sanguinius was bade to learn the ways of war at the side of the 16th Primarch, Horus Lupacal. While the wolf and the angel formed a bond that was to persist for decades, the Revenant Legion was pulled from its campaigns and combat zones, not informed of the reason for their withdrawal, but expecting it to be some altogether newer and more dire war that required their grim talents. Upon the stormy surface of the planet Tegar did the bloody army gather, only to be presented with some shock with their own gene sire. Sanguinius, in his typically idiosyncratic yet deptlessly empathetic way, did not demand their loyalty. Instead he knelt, a primarch before his sons, offering them his own fealty. The impact of such a gesture cannot be understated. For their entire existence, the warriors of the Ninth Legion had been entirely shunned by the rest of humanity, cast out from the Imperium simply for being who and what they are, by prostrating himself at their fore, by treating them as human, not monster. The angel won their immediate adoration and respect. The worlds of the Tegar system, infested with a strain of abhuman humanity, too divergent to be integrated or let persist, was to be the first crucible upon which the angel would blood his already well-blooded Legion, and in the carnage that ensued he first beheld the darkness that lay within the hearts of his sons. Easily he perceived it too, for he founded a mirror of his own. His foresight showered him with echoey visions, of his blood soaked self at the head of a legion of crimson monsters. Yet, Sanguinius being Sanguinius, he spat in the face of this sight. He saw too the nobility of his sons was not simply an aesthetic aspect of their faces, but was there within each and every one of them. It was a seed he intended to fully nurture. These new blood angels would become the architects of their own fate. The angel petitioned his brother Horus for aid at once, and, as the first of his reforms, immediately assigned each and every company of the blood angels to fight alongside a company of the Lunawolves. Too long had his sons festered in isolation from the rest of their cousins. Now they would take their place alongside the vaunted champions of humanity. This exchange was soon broadened out to as many legions as would acquiesce, something smoothed over by the humility and charm of Sanguinius himself, who proved quite adept at winning the hearts of his brothers not through guile, but genuine warmth and friendship. The blood angels were now exposed to as many forms of warfare as the crusade could throw at them, learning not only the ways of the new types of war-making, but finding as well a newfound kinship with their cousins from other legions. The change in the ninth's character was as rapid as it was extreme. Seeking to emulate their primark in every way, the blood angels cast aside the cold callousness they had been known for, embracing a newfound compassion for those they served and served alongside. Their cannibalistic hunger was reined in, impossible to completely eradicate, but now tempered with an iron discipline enforced through every rank. As recruits from Baal swelled their ranks, they sought to cast off their barbarity of old, striving to become the champions they knew humanity wanted of the Astartes. They embraced culture, art, learning, debate and study, the finer arts even their fellow legions entirely disregarded as being wastes of time. To the blood angels, their only means of tempering their blood hunger lay in the embrace of all humanity's virtues. They still waged war with the fury unseen in all but a few legions, but did so now with an acute intelligence at work behind the crimson war plate. Rarely in the annals of the legion as Astartes has a change in character been so marked and so striking for the sheer good that it did. Not only for the legion, but for all humanity. The blood angels recast themselves, turning on their heel from being the pariahs of the great crusade to its icons. The speed of their assaults, the furies of their wars, the peerlessness of their art, the nobility of their bearing, all became rich pickings for the remembrancers that were drawn and openly welcomed to their expeditionary fleets. They turned from being tacitly hated to being openly adored, fighting at the forefront of the most noble of campaigns for the purest of purposes. Sanguinius became perhaps the most universally adored and respected of his brothers, as within that fractious family, a complex web of relationships, both wholesome and begrudging, had two centuries into the great crusade fully developed. The angel navigated this with a plan, admired by all his siblings, treating each with a warmth and brotherly love that was even known to have cooled Angron's famous collar. Only Horus stood above him, and indeed, were it not for him, Sanguinius would have likely been the head upon which the crown of Bormaster would be placed. Supercal himself, from the accounts of his Mornaval, had on his darker days openly wished it had been so, for he saw his angelic brother as embodying the truest virtues of the Imperium, and presenting the best aspects of their father to the masses of humanity. The Blood Angels followed suit, ever striving now to be the Paragons their gene sire seemed to exemplify so easily, both as cultural emissaries of humanity and as the emperor's descending angelic justice. So, when the call from Horus came to them to prosecute the reclamation of the seemingly lost Cygnus cluster, who were they to say no? The vagaries of fate. One cannot help but dream of that possible future, where Sanguinius had been invested as Warmaster, at the head of a legion reborn to represent the best we could aspire to be. What a different Imperium we may have had, had such a thing come to pass, alas, until such a time as I can bring myself to commit to record the terrible events of Cygnus. Ave Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra.