[SPEAKER_00]: The rain had been coming in off the ocean since mid-afternoon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the heavy rain of a coastal autumn that settled with clouds that were dark enough to suggest that the rain would fall for a long while yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It ran down the ancient stonework of the fortress wars, finding the gaps that centuries of salt wind had opened in the mortar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dripping from the carved figures above the doorways, with a sound like patient fingers on a tabletop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside it is audible as a familiar background noise, a constant soft percussion against the tall windows of the upper scriptorium.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of sound that makes the warmth within, feel earned, and the simple fact of being inside and sheltered, felt on such a night, like a small but genuine grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scriptorium itself smelled of parchment,
[SPEAKER_00]: Primarily, the dry, faintly sweet smell of old documents stacked in careful disorder, folios and fragments and road scrolls, sorted into arrangements that make sense to the person responsible for them, and to no one else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beneath that, the faint chemical smells of preservation wax from the sealed documents that have arrived from other archives on other worlds, and underneath everything else, grounding it all, the smell of the candles, good wax, burning slowly and cleanly, arranged across the width of the wide stone desk to push the shadows back to a respectful distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The desk was covered in the accumulated material of what has become over the months, a considerable undertaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Parchman fragments, some of them very old, their edges brown and fragile, covered in the cramped script of scribes long-deared on worlds that may no longer exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Data slates stacked in towers, their surfaces dark and dormant,
[SPEAKER_00]: Their contents accessed so many times in recent weeks that their casings carry the marks of habitual use.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wax sealed folios from half a dozen different sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: The seals of blood angels' successor chapters pressed into colours that have faded with the ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: The deep crimson of one brotherhood, the black of another, the gold of a third.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vaelith of the Blood Angels is not a young space marine, though the word young carries different meaning in a chapter whose members measure their service in centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has the stillness of someone who has become very accustomed to sitting for long hours in his own company.
[SPEAKER_00]: The task before him is one he was given with honour, and while it is a task of huge responsibility,
[SPEAKER_00]: Ordinaryly, this kind of work is compiled for heroes that have passed away.
[SPEAKER_00]: This particular piece of history, however, is being written about a man who is still alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: This adds a little pressure to the task, because the subject could well read the history that is being written about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has written, at the top of the first page of his preamble, a question that he did not intend as a question when he began it, and that he has not answered in the month since, and that he suspects he will not answer before he is finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: How does one measure 1500 years of war?
[SPEAKER_00]: He sets the page aside, he takes a fresh sheet from the stack at his left hand, smooth and pale in the candlelight, and he sets it before him, and he dips his pen, and outside the rain continues his pattern against the ancient stones, and the candles burn their steady gold, and the fortress around him is full of the deep and settled silence of a place that has stood for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a place on the second moon of bar that the people who live there call the Great Salt Waste, and if you were to ask them what it is like, they would probably tell you first about the silence and then about the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: The light here is a flat, colourless thing that falls on everything and flatters nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns the horizon into a pale smear where the land and sky blend into the same exhausted haze.
[SPEAKER_00]: They might tell you about the thirst, which arrives on the second day, out from the settlements and does not leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: They might tell you about the way the radiation has worked itself into the soil, across so many generations, that it has become simply a fact of the place, like weather, something you are born into, and carry with you in the markings it leaves on the skin.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way it quietly shortens lives in bends, spines, and ensures that the people of Balsakundas are almost without exception, smaller and wearier than the rest of humanity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Into this world, in a year recorded in the oldest fragments, as 447 of the 40th millennium, a boy named Louice was born to a man called Arias.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the margins where the salt waste meets the edge of what might generously be called civilisation.
[SPEAKER_00]: His mother is present in the surviving records, but seems absent.
[SPEAKER_00]: They note that she died when the boy was seven years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great lives so often begin with loss, the boy who grew up in the years after that loss was not remarkable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was shorter than the other children of his tribe, the radiation that marked him as it marked everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no gifts that set him apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: No elder looked at him and felt the hares rise on the back of their neck in the way that stories of heroes often tell.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sky did not trouble itself to produce omens on the night of his birth, and if any prophet was moved to speak his name, none of them left a record of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he had, the fragments suggest, was the particular stubbornness of someone who has learned early, that the world will not bend itself to your needs or wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is you who must go out and make things happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, at an age when most who made the attempt did not survive the first day of the journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Louis left his father's settlement and began to walk toward a place called Angels 4.
[SPEAKER_00]: The place of choosing, where the sons of sanguinius gathered the children of Baal's tribes to test them, once a generation, for the qualities that might make them something more than what the sort waste intended.
[SPEAKER_00]: The journey was the first trial.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many tried it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The records of those who completed it are brief, because there were not many of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the records of those who did not are brief are still.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there was no one left to write them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thirst came for Louise as it came for everyone on the second day.
[SPEAKER_00]: wrapping itself around his will and tightening slowly, turning each step into a struggle and each hour into a negotiation with the part of himself that understood with increasing clarity that the sensible thing would be to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he did not stop, and then, when he could go no further, and the cracked earth had come up to meet his knees, he looked up, and here, the accounts become uncertain.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the oldest source is agree upon is this, that there was a figure, golden and winged, standing in the waste, and that there was water, and that Louise, drank it, and stood, and walked on.
[SPEAKER_00]: He eventually reached Angel's fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was still unremarkable when he arrived, and malnourished and marked by the desert.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he had made it, and the Imperium would build around this young man, the aura of inevitability.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sense that destiny had plans for this unremarkable man.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the records, red plainly, and without the gilding the time applies to everything it touches,
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell a quieter and more affecting story than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They tell the story of a boy who was hungry and small and had lost the people he loved, who heard the whisper of the salt waste, and who walked toward a thing he had no certainty of reaching because he was desperate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Angel's fall is not, despite what its name might suggest, a gentle place.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a place of endings, the ending of childhood, the ending of the life that came before, the ending of whatever a boy thought he was, before the sons of sangrinius, looked at him, and began the long, uns sentimental process of deciding whether he has what it takes.
[SPEAKER_00]: the trials that awaited Louise and the other aspirants who had made the journey were not designed to find the best among them in a simple way.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were designed with a process that was developed across thousands of years of bitter experience to find something far more specific and far more difficult to name.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of the trials was in some ways the most honest, because it asked nothing of the boys at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was simply chance, a winnowing in the oldest sense of the word, the separation of what survives from what does not, with no particular regard for merit or promise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Half of those who had walked so far, and suffered so much did not pass beyond it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Louis did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Luck is not a virtue, but it is a beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The subsequent trials tested the body in the ways one might expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strength, speed, endurance, the physical qualities that the process of becoming an
[SPEAKER_00]: In these trials, Luis placed by every account, somewhere in the unremarkable middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not the fastest, he was not the strongest, he did not distinguish himself in any of the ways that draw the eye or invite the kind of notation that survives the centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: He simply continued steadily and without apparent drama, which is its own form of excellence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The trial of war was different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here, for the first time, something in Lourish catches and holds the attention of the older stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he was brilliant, though his tactical clarity in leading his forced victory was noted, but because of what victory cost him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The deaths of other aspirants in the trial of war were not incidental to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, in a sense, the point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The trial asked not only whether a boy could win, but what winning meant to him, and what he was willing to carry afterward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Luis won.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, when it was over, he was sick and riot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not undone, not broken, or made useless by grief, which would have been a different and simpler thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, the way a person of conscience is second, when the world reveals the distance between what it requires, and what they believe the world should be like.
[SPEAKER_00]: What came next was the trial of Horus.
[SPEAKER_00]: The details of this trial are not recorded in full in the fragments because some things are kept secret and perhaps rightly so.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is preserved is the shape of it, the moment at its center, the choice that it asked for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Luis was presented with a fellow aspirant and a blade, and with the unspoken expectation that one would be used upon the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the final question of the trials posed without ceremony, and it had claimed many boys before him who had simply done what the situation appeared to demand, who had looked at the blade in the boy and performed the mathematics, and arrived
[SPEAKER_00]: Luis refused to raise the blade.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held it for a long moment, long enough that the watching priests might have been forgiven for thinking he was simply working up the will for it, and then he set it down and accepted what he believed to be the consequence of that refusal, which was failure, and the end of everything he had walked so far and suffered so much to reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: As it turns out, this was not a failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: The priests who watched him set the blade down, saw in that refusal, the quality they had spent the entire trial trying to find.
[SPEAKER_00]: The understanding arrived at through instinct rather than instruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: that there are things a blood angel must be willing to do, and things that a blood angel must be unwilling to do, and that the ability to tell the difference in the moment when the cost of refusing is everything you have, is the rarest and most necessary quality of all.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chapter had built into the very architecture of its trials, a final question whose correct answer were the face of failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a malnourished unremarkable boy from the margins of the Great Silk Waste, who had no particular gifts, and no particular destiny that anyone had thought to write down, had understood this when many others had not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he was clever, because he was beneath everything the desert had done to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was taken to the fortress monastery on bar.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next part
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a moment in the long history of the blood angels that every brother who has passed through it carries with them for the rest of their life, however many centuries that life may be.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the moment of the sanguinary chalice, an ancient thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: filled with a substance that is similar to blood, synthesize from the genetic legacy of sanguinius himself, and offered to each new aspirant in the great armoured cathedral of the fortress monastery beneath the marble gaze of 10,000 years of the chapters on a dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: To drink from it is to begin the process of becoming.
[SPEAKER_00]: The aspirants who drink from the chalice are entombed in sarcophagi of stone, sealed inside for the duration of the gene seed implantation.
[SPEAKER_00]: A process so demanding and so intricate that the body must be given the full measure of that time to accomplish it, undisturbed in the deep quiet of a sleep.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most aspirants pass through this period in something like peace, or at least in something that resembles silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some do not survive at a tour, which the sanguinery priests accept with sorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is simply the way of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone receives them, and most of them it gives back, changed and remade, and some of them it keeps.
[SPEAKER_00]: Louise, it gave back, but not quietly.
[SPEAKER_00]: From the first days of his entoment, the sanguine reprisence noted that something was wrong, or different, which in this context amounted to the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He cried out from within the sealed stone, not in the formless way of a body and distress, but with words, specific words, names, spoken with urgency.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded like someone trying to warn a room full of people about something only they can see.
[SPEAKER_00]: The names he shouted were not the names of the living.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the names of primax, who had been dead for 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: The names of demons that had not troubled the material realm in a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The names of things that had no reason to be present in the dreaming mind of a malnourished boy from the salt-waste of balsicundas.
[SPEAKER_00]: and yet were there, vivid enough to draw screams present enough to keep him in that terrible middle between sleep and waking, for the entire length of his entomement, neither fully under nor fully above, and then there were the marks on the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the year had passed and the priests came to open the sarcophagus, they found that someone inside it had made a very determined effort to open it themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: The underside of the lid bore the evidence of this, in long desperate furrows, worked into the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: No aspirant in the long memory of the chapter had ever done this, certainly none had done it, and lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, the accounts say, perfectly composed, which was in its own way the strangest thing of all the strange things that surrounded his emergence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy who had gone into the stone was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: In his place stood someone with the angular luminous face that sangrineus' blood grants all his sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: The radiation marks of bar, secunders, scoured away by the transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: the malnourishment of a childhood in the sought waste, replaced by something angelic.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at the priests gathered around him, and he waited, calmly, for whatever happened next.
[SPEAKER_00]: The priests debated, as priests and scholars always do, when confronted with something that does not fit tidally into what they already know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some among them looked at the screaming, the disturbed sleep, the desperate marks on the stone, and saw in them the early signature of the black rage, the curse that waited for every blood angel somewhere in their future.
[SPEAKER_00]: The descent into the relive death of their primeark, that would eventually claim any brother
[SPEAKER_00]: The signs were there, they argued, and they were not good signs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Others looked at the same evidence and arrived at a different conclusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: They pointed to the composure, with which he had emerged, to the fact that he had survived something that should have killed him, to the quality of endurance that the whole episode suggested.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not know what it meant, but they did not believe it meant ruins.
[SPEAKER_00]: The records that survive from the centuries between Louisa's emergence from the sarcophagus and the catastrophe at Callius' landing are by any measure extensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the records of an institution doing what institutions do, cataloging actions, coordinates, casualty figures, the names of worlds pacified and enemies put down, written in the dry language that the Imperium has perfected across 10,000 years of bureaucratic necessity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They tell you what happened in approximately when and they tell you the cost in the numerical ways that costs are tallied when there are too many of them to mourn individually.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they do not tell you very much at all about the man at the center of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the records do offer, read carefully and with patience, is something that may in the end be more valuable than the dramatic details they withhold.
[SPEAKER_00]: They offer consistency.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the centuries of campaigning show, in campaigning after campaigning across a hundred worlds, whose names blur together in the archive, is a captain who holds, who does not spend the lives of those under his command, as though they were a currency he has been given in inexorstable
[SPEAKER_00]: who is at the front of the line, and who is there without the performance, without the theatre that some officers used to build the legend of themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: He simply goes where the work is hardest, and does the work, and the records note this in their impersonal way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many wars end cleanly, with a victor and a vanquished and a line drawn beneath them, that everyone agrees to honour, and there are wars of another kind, the kind that begin with a single fire and reveal themselves, as the smoke clears, to have been burning underground for a very long time across a much larger area than anyone had first thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: and by the time the blood angels understood what they had walked into, it had already closed around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had come to support the angels' luminous, their kindred successor chapter, who had found themselves pressed beyond their means by a rebellion that the initial reports had described as containerable.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood angels were not strangers to such requests.
[SPEAKER_00]: They answered them the way they answered most things, directly and in strength, with brother Captain Dante and his company, among those who made planet fall on calluses landing and its dependency worlds, expecting the kind of campaign that would take weeks and be remembered in footnotes.
[SPEAKER_00]: what they found instead was a net of conflict, and they had walked into the center of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: World after world across the subsector was rising.
[SPEAKER_00]: The insurrection spreading like it had been organized in secret before it was allowed to show itself, fed from the shadows by traitor marines, under the guise of a dozen different war bands,
[SPEAKER_00]: who understood that the most destructive fires are the ones you let someone else believe they have contained.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood angels engaged, and held, and fought with everything they had, and the months became years, and the years drew on, and all the while the roles of Honour grew longer, and the ranks grew thinner, and the price of every metre of ground held was paid in
[SPEAKER_00]: Relief came, eventually, astro-militarum regiments, allied chapters answering the call.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with it came the slow grinding work of reclamation, world by world, until at last the blood angels could withdraw, they left with pride in what they had done, they had fought well, they had held when holding seemed impossible, and the war had eaten away at them,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was as the remnants of the fleet, gathered above calluses landing, battered and reduced but intact, that the universe delivered its final judgment on the cost of what they had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The traitor Armada came out of the warped without warning, at a time when the blood angels believed they had been relieved and were able to recover for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: This surprise assault created three days of fighting in the void and in the corridors of ships.
[SPEAKER_00]: The close and brutal kind of warfare that strips away everything, except the immediate question of whether you will still be alive when the next second arrives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante and the warriors of his company fought through those three days with a ferocity that the records written mostly by people who were dying when they wrote them struggle to convey in four.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seven chaos capital class vessels were taken and scuttled.
[SPEAKER_00]: The details of how this was accomplished exist only in pieces, because the people who could have filled in the gaps between those pieces were largely gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the fighting ended, and the accounting began, the numbers returned was so reduced that several of the surviving priests checked them more than once before accepting that they were correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer than 200 blood angels remained, of all the captains who had led companies into that war, across all the years of it, precisely one was still alive to hear the final count.
[SPEAKER_00]: They gathered in the chapel of a ship, the last sanguinary priests and chaplains of the chapter, still in their armour, because they had not been time to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the marks of three days of fighting still on them, and the weight of everything they had just survived, settling into their bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: They looked at one another, and they looked at what was left, and then they looked at the
[SPEAKER_00]: and they did the only thing left to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: They asked him to carry the title of chapter master.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante accepted the title of Lord of the Angelic Host.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been chosen because he was the last one standing and the most fitting.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no other reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: The records are honest enough to preserve this without dressing it in anything more flattering.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never wore red again.
[SPEAKER_00]: From that day, and for every day that followed, across more than a thousand years of service, he wore gold.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Artifice of armour of the chapter master, sacred and shining.
[SPEAKER_00]: The colour of the archangel, that the Imperium would eventually decide, he had always been destined to become.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Imperium loves that story, and it is not an unworthy one, but the history read plainly and with the patience they deserve, tell something both smaller and greater than destiny.
[SPEAKER_00]: They tell the story of a man standing in a room full of the dying in broken armour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Being handed something too heavy for one person to carry, and choosing to carry it anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he had been prepared for it, not because some golden thread of fate had been drawing him toward this moment, since the day he was born on the margins of the so waste, but simply because someone had to, and he was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thousand years is a length of time that the human mind can sometimes struggle to hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: We speak of centuries the way we speak of distances, too long to walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the abstract, with a kind of intellectual appreciation that substitutes for the genuine understanding we cannot quite achieve.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thousand years of war, of command, of loss and victory.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the slow grinding work of keeping something precious alive in a universe that is fundamentally indifferent to its survival.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not something that can be summarized without a certain violence being done to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it left behind is by any measure extraordinary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Subsectors cleansed of the darkness that had settled into them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Demon Lords, broken and banished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their armies dissolving back into the warp behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Among these the bloodthirsty scar brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: the exiled son of Corn, a creature of such concentrated fury that the records of those who faced it, struggled to find language adequate to the experience, brought down at a place called the Gates of Pandemonium.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hold on the material realm ended by the Axe Mortales and the man who carried it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world of Terion, which had been given over to the Night Lords and a Warband called the Brotherhood of Darkness, was taken back, and has since been rebuilt into something that resembles peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the capital city of Terion, there stands a marble colossus of Dante, one hand extended toward the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the people who live beneath it were born into a world that exists because of what happened there, though most of them do not know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second war for Armageddon deserves more than a passing note, because it is the campaign in which something that had always been present in Dante's way of fighting becomes fully and publicly visible.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the awe-cawed of Gaskh cool, descended on that battered hive world, the space marine chapters who answered the call found themselves under the overall command of the Lord of Angels.
[SPEAKER_00]: A command that speaks to the regard in which he was held, given that among those chapters were the Ultramarines and the Salamanders, whose commanders were not men accustomed to deferring to anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: They deferred to Dante.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their tactical maneuvers broke the orcs supply lines, with a skill that left the great school hammers and stompers of the hoard, starved of the parts and fuel that kept them moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the orc tide, romped of its heaviest weapons, broke at last before the wars of Tartarus hive.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the final fighting, the Dante and Tushan of the Salamanders stood back to back against Gazi-Ku's bodyguard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two lords of two of the Imperians greatest chapters, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the old way, the way that strips away everything, except the person beside you and the enemy in front of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gerenna campaign is remembered differently, not
[SPEAKER_00]: and in its own way more revealing.
[SPEAKER_00]: For three weeks on the dusty plains of Gehenner, Dante's forces and the Necron legions of the silent king fought to a stalemate that neither side could break.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each countering the others' movements which turned the campaign into something like a conversation between two minds of comparable depth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Conducted entirely in the language of warfare.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is quietly unsettling to read those accounts, to follow a reputation that has preceded itself across a thousand years and a thousand victories, and to find that even this was not always enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stalemate was broken not by genius on either side, but by the arrival of a tyrannid splinter fleet, which has a way of resolving disagreements by replacing them with a more immediate problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: the two forces turned together against the common threat and fought alongside one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not a simple thing, because the two armies had just been trying to kill each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: That being said, they were victorious, and when it was over, they parted without ceremony.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both two warned to guarantee the outcome of a rematch, and perhaps both quietly grateful for the excuse not to find out.
[SPEAKER_00]: What a thousand years of this leaves in a person is not something that a historian can measure directly, but they gesture at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: These gestures are more like a shadow of a thing than the thing itself, but they provide us with some indication.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante has been changed across the centuries, the accounts suggest, not by any one failure or triumph, but by the sheer accumulation of both.
[SPEAKER_00]: by the weight of everything that has been asked of him, and everything he has given in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: The death mask of Sangrinius has not left his face in public in all that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a thousand years of imperial archives gathered from sources across the breadth of the galaxy, there is not a single reliable account of his unmasked face written by anyone who did not take that knowledge with them
[SPEAKER_00]: This too is a kind of discipline.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most sustained and perhaps the most demanding kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The discipline of becoming what is needed rather than what one is.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Imperium does not need Dante to be a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: It needs him to be an image, a golden certainty in an age of gathering darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: A face that does not change because the mask never comes off, and the mask never changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has understood this for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has been giving the Imperium what it needs of him since the day he put the gold on.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a listing chapel, over armour still dark with other people's blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it has cost him anything to do so, we will likely never know.
[SPEAKER_00]: We now come to the bow system.
[SPEAKER_00]: The news that arrived in the year 998 of the 41st millennium was not in truth, a surprise to Dante, not entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Krypton Shield, the chain of fortress worlds in the Krypton system, that had long stood as a barrier between high fleet Leviathan and the Barrel system.
[SPEAKER_00]: had been a line drawn in hope as much as in stone, and hope is not always enough to hold against the great devourer.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the reports came confirming what the four wood strike forces had already been suggesting, that the shield had collapsed, that the fortress worlds had fallen, that the Leviathan was moving slowly towards them, Dante received them and continued the work he had already been doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been preparing for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strike forces had been ranging through the region, known as the Red Scar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hitting the Leviathan splinter fleets in the quick sharp engagements that could be one without committing strength that Barl would need.
[SPEAKER_00]: bleeding the advance where it could be blood without being stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: On ball and its two moons, fortresses had been rising from the irradiated sands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great heavy structures designed to make every approach costly, to turn the landscape itself into an argument against the enemy's advance.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the call had gone out across the stars to every chapter that shared the blood of Sangrinius.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every son of the Sangrini Brotherhood, who could be reached and moved in time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came, the blood drinkers came, the carmine blades came, chapter after chapter answered, sending what they had, and in some cases sending nearly everything they had, because the homeworld of that primarck was calling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was no answer to that call, except yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Knights of Blood came, the Knights of Blood, who had been declared excommunicate
[SPEAKER_00]: who had no standing in the eyes of imperial law and no guarantee of anything except the probability of dying on a moon far from wherever they had been when the message reached them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came anyway because Dante had asked and because sangrinius had made them what they were and because some obligations ran deeper than the law.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante led his own strike force into the cryptosystem first, the first and second companies of the blood angels, chief librarian, mafiston, Gabriel Seth, and the bulk of his flesh tieros.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a final attempt to shore up what remained of the outer defenses, or if that proved impossible to make the Leviathan pay for every step of its advance.
[SPEAKER_00]: what was found in the cryptosystem was beyond saving.
[SPEAKER_00]: An ancient weapon of Necrontia origin called the Magnovitryan was unleashed in desperation.
[SPEAKER_00]: An entire world unmade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its destruction used to tear the heart out of an on-rushing splinter fleet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the kind of decision that does not appear in the records surrounded by anything resembling ceremony, because the people who made it understood that there was no version of it that deserved celebration.
[SPEAKER_00]: It slowed the Leviathan.
[SPEAKER_00]: It bought time, but it did not stop anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: the forces returned to bow, and the preparations deepened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gene seed reserves of the chapter, precious beyond almost any other thing the blood angels possessed, the genetic legacy of sangrinius himself held in careful custody across 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: were packed in place to board fast ships under armed escort, and sent away from Baal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Away from what was coming, entrusted to the void, and the hope that somewhere beyond the reach of the Leviathan, they would survive, even if the chapter itself did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a practical decision, and it was also an acknowledgment written in actions, rather than words that the chapter was preparing, for the possibility of its own ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: 40,000 young people were gathered from the tribal settlements of Baal and its moons.
[SPEAKER_00]: The aspirants who had not yet faced their trials and others besides anyone old enough to hold a weapon, and brought to the fortress monastery and armed, and told that those who survived what was coming, would surely have proven themselves worthy of a place among the chapters ranks.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a kindness of a sword.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also almost certainly not true in the way that the things we say to people standing on the edge of the unservivable are often not quite true.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are moments in the history of the Imperium that function less like events and more like thresholds, places where the story of a people passes through a door that does not open from the other side, where everything that follows is permanently and irrevocably different from everything that came before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The devastation of Baal is one of these moments and it is worth approaching it with the care it deserves because it is the kind of story that is easy to tell badly.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is easy to tell it as a catalogue of destruction, a list of waves and casualties and defensive lines lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Leviathan arrived and the stars went out.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is not a figure of speech, the fleet of high fleet Leviathan that entered the ball system.
[SPEAKER_00]: was so vast, so densely packed with the bioships that the light of the stars beyond it was simply blocked, swallowed by the sheer mass of vessels moving in concert.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those who stood on the surface of Baal and looked up and saw not stars at that advancing shadow have left records of what it felt like, and the records all agree.
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt like the end of something, and they were right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood angels fleet went out to meet it, because that was what they did, and because seeding the void without a fight was not in the nature of the sons of sanguineers.
[SPEAKER_00]: battlebarges and cruisers drove into the mass of bioships with everything they had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lance batteries and broadsides tearing into the living vessels, and for a time the darkness above bar was lit with the fires of dying ships on both sides, and the void was thick with the debris of things that had been enormous, and were now simply wreckage.
[SPEAKER_00]: They took a toll.
[SPEAKER_00]: The records are careful to preserve this, that the void wall was not simply a defeat, that it cost the Leviathan something, that the blood angels and their successor chapters fought in the darkness above their homeworld, with a skill and a fury that would have been decisive against any enemy that could be reduced by skill and fury alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the Leviathan did not reduce, for every bioship broken and gutted, more came forward, and then more behind those, and the imperial vessels were isolated one by one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first waves hit ball and its moons, and were broken on the fortifications that had been months in the building.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pre-ranged artillery that had memorized every approach, the boulder in placements that turn the ground before the defensive lines into something no living thing should have been able to cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first waves died in their thousands on that ground, and it was not enough, because the second waves came larger, and had already learned from the first, and the third waves came larger still, and this was the particular horror of the thing they were fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That it did not simply throw itself at the walls, the way an awkward throws itself at walls, with glorious and almost admirable disregard for the cast.
[SPEAKER_00]: It watched, it learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each wave that broke against the blood angels' defenses taught the hive mind something about the shape of those defenses.
[SPEAKER_00]: And each wave that followed was a question asked with the improvements that the previous answer had suggested.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the tenth wave, the outer lines had been breached, and the gates of the death company cells were opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand what that means requires understanding something about the blood angels that they do not often speak of to those outside the brotherhood of sangrinius' sons.
[SPEAKER_00]: The knowledge that somewhere in every blood angel's future, if he lives long enough, the visions come.
[SPEAKER_00]: the death of their primarch, experienced as though it were happening now, in this moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again and again with a vividness that erodes the boundary between memory and madness, until there is no boundary left.
[SPEAKER_00]: The brothers who have crossed that boundary, who live now entirely inside the last moments of sanguiniers, are the death company, given Red Armor marked with black, given weapons and pointed at the enemy, because if the ending has already come for them, then at least let the ending be useful.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been there in their cells throughout the fighting, hearing what was happening outside, and now the doors were opened, and they came out into the battle, and they were terrible, and they were necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Five chapter masters of the sanguinary brotherhood fell in the fighting across Barl and its moons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three of them fell at a place called the Dome of Angels, in a single engagement whose
[SPEAKER_00]: their names are there in the archives.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came because they were asked, and they died defending the cradle of their lineage.
[SPEAKER_00]: as the swarm pressed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final perimeter drew in around the fortress monastery itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The arcs and jellicum, the great seat of the blood angels, ancient and storied.
[SPEAKER_00]: The place where Luis had drunk from the sanguinery chalice, an age ago, and had clawed at the stone of his sarcophagus, and had emerged into the life that had brought him here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Tower of Amareo was opened, and the remaining death company brothers came out for the last time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fighting at the walls of the arcs in Jelikum was the kind of fighting that the people who survived it, spent the rest of their lives trying to find words for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante was everywhere in those final hours, and he was bleeding.
[SPEAKER_00]: The accounts described the wounds he was carrying in the press of the fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: A dozen of them, serious wounds, the kind that would have ended most people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they also describe, with a consistency that suggests they are simply reporting what they saw, rather than embellishing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: that he was still moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still directing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still the fixed point around which the defense of the arc's angelicum organized itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The golden figure at the center of the storm, whose continued presence in the line was itself a kind of argument against despair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite his damaged armor and serious wounds, Dante continues to fight in the close, quarters defense of his home.
[SPEAKER_00]: His strike becoming slower, his reactions not quite as quick.
[SPEAKER_00]: In these close quarters, he eventually fell as the damage and exhaustion took him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not yet died, but he had fallen nonetheless.
[SPEAKER_00]: the armies around him strained toward the place where the golden armour had gone down, pushing through the press of bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Above them the sky above bar was burning with the light of a battle that had been going on so long that the smoke of it had become simply the new colour of the atmosphere.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the fires of the funeral pires, and the fires of the void war, and the fires of the emperor's light were indistinguishable from one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything was burning, and the lord of angels lay on the ground of his homeworld, and did not rise.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was around this time that a rift opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The skies above ball burned, and through the tear in the sky above ball prime, something came.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be easy, and perhaps forgivable, to mistake what came for salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: to see the demonic legions pouring through the rift, and think in the desperate confusion of that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: That anything which fell upon the tyrannids must be falling upon them in the defense of what the tyrannids were consuming.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the distinction matters enormously, and the records are careful to preserve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kabanda did not come to Baal Prime to save the sons of Sangwinias.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kabanda came because the sons of Sangwinias were his, his to destroy, his to end.
[SPEAKER_00]: The honour of their ruin belonging to him and to no other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the idea that the tyrannids swarmed might consume them before he had the opportunity to do so himself, was something the ancient bloodthirsty of corn found intolerable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He and the blood angels had a history that stretched back further than most of the imperiums current wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back to a campaign called the Cygnus Crusade, where Kabanda had done something to the sons of sanguinius that they had been carrying in their blood ever since.
[SPEAKER_00]: a deepening of the curse, a stoking of the red thirst, a wound inflicted not on bodies, but on the gene seed itself that had echoed down through every subsequent generation of blood angels and their successor chapters.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not come as an ally.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come as a claimant, arriving to a certain ownership of their ending that was, in its own deeply terrible way, almost personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fighting on bar prime was chaos in the oldest and most literal sense of the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bloodletters tearing into tyrannid warriors, blood crushes of corn stampeding through formations of term
[SPEAKER_00]: the demon legions and the zenos swarmed destroying one another with an abandon that served neither cause and satisfied only the blood gods endless appetite for slaughter regardless of its source.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood angels and their brotherhood fell back through this madness, fighting on two fronts against enemies who were also fighting each other, trying to reach their ships while the world they were standing on, came apart beneath them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gabriel's death and his fleshed heroes fought the withdrawal heroically, covering the retreat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the knights of blood, the excommunicated, the outcast, the chapter that had come when
[SPEAKER_00]: The black rage took them in those last moments on bar prime, that most terrible gift of their primarx death, and they went into the close fighting with the freedom of brothers, who had already let go of everything, and they held the line long enough for the survivors to board their vessels.
[SPEAKER_00]: In orbit, the Leviathan's fleet was disappearing, snatched into the churning energies of the newly born great rift, bioships tumbling into rips and reality that closed behind them, and left the void suddenly, impossibly, quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shadow that had swallowed the stars was lifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The living ocean was draining away into a darkness deeper than the void.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where it had been, there was simply space again, and the distant clean light of stars that had been there all along, waiting patiently behind the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: on the surface of bow, the fighting continued.
[SPEAKER_00]: Time had become unreliable in the warp storm.
[SPEAKER_00]: It could have been hours since Dante had fallen, or it could have been far longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fleet was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The warriors of the blood angels in their brotherhood moved through the ruins of the arcs and jellacum against the remains of the swarm, and the swarm without its coordinator
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the stars changed again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Robert Gilliman had come to bar, and while the fighting continued on the surface, and the long nightmare was not over, it had changed, and change, even changed born in ruin, can be something good.
[SPEAKER_00]: The weeks that followed the arrival of the endometres crusade were not glorious weeks, they were slow, unglomerous, and absolutely necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a labour of people moving through the wreckage of something enormous, and trying to understand what is left, and what can be saved from what is left.
[SPEAKER_00]: Drop pods and storm raven gunships filled the skies above bow where the bioships had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: and among the warriors they delivered were faces and forms that the surviving blood angels did not recognise.
[SPEAKER_00]: The primary space marines, a new breed grown from old science, unfrozen from the deep vaults of the Ark Magos, Bellissarius Corps, and carrying in their bodies the refined legacy of gene seeds that coal had been tending in secret for longer than most living things had been alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wore the colours of the blood angels and fought beside the suns of sanguineas.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if there was strangeness in it, in fighting the side brothers, you had never trained with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whose faces you did not know, who had come from somewhere outside the long continuity of the chapter's history.
[SPEAKER_00]: This strangeness was not shown at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Barl and Barça-Kunders were cleared in the weeks that followed, the hunt for the remaining tyrannid survivors carried out through the irradiated wastes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clusters of aliens had fled into the desert places that the fighting had not yet reached, and they were found, and they were ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: And slowly the ground that had been lost was walked again by something other than the
[SPEAKER_00]: It was during this period that Dante not before Gilman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante was gravely wounded, the injuries from fighting in his last stand, and a duel with a swarm lord, and the long hours with no rest had left him in a serious condition, but alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: He now knelt before the returned primarck.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fifteen hundred years of service, Dante had never knelt before a primarck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because the gesture was beneath him, nothing of that kind was ever beneath him, but
[SPEAKER_00]: for the entirety of his long life, from the soquests of Barsakundas, to the chapel where he was given the gold, from Calius' landing, to the walls of the arcs and jellicum.
[SPEAKER_00]: The primax had been figures of memory and faith, and the kind of presence that exists in the bones of a chapter's traditions, rather than in the flesh of a living face.
[SPEAKER_00]: To kneel before one now, before a being who had known sangrinius, who had walked beside him in the age before the long darkness, must have been something for which 1500 years had not quite been preparation enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gilliman's gift to the chapter was generous.
[SPEAKER_00]: The primarismarines already fighting on bar were only the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: More would come, drawn from the gene seed of sanguineus, carrying the bloodline of the chapter forward into a future that the devastation had very nearly prevented from existing at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: A new era of the blood angels was beginning, in the ruins of the old one.
[SPEAKER_00]: and what it would eventually become was not yet clear to anyone, which is perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about any beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: While Prime was surveyed from orbit, what the survey found across the moon's southern hemisphere was not the expected desolation of a battlefield scoured clean.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was something that had been arranged.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ziggurat's of tyrannid scars, piled to impossible heights, shaped into the ape-piloured sigil of corn, across a vast expanse of dead ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kabandu's signature, written in the bones of his enemies, left for the sons of Sangrinius to find and to understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: The message required no translation.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not come to save them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come to remind them that they are ending belong to him, and that he was patient, and that he would come again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dante ordered the orbital bombardment that
[SPEAKER_00]: Then Gilman spoke of his appointment, which settled on Dante's shoulders, alongside everything else he already carried.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord Regent of the Imperium, Nihalus, ruler in all practical terms of the half of the Imperium that the great rifted cutoff from Tara, severed from the light of the astronomical, isolated in a darkness that was now something more than metaphor.
[SPEAKER_00]: an enormous realm of human worlds, struggling and frightened and pressing against a darkness that had become literal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Needing someone to stand watch over them, who had the standing and the experience that Dante had been demonstrating across 1500 years of unhurried, consistent, unglomerous service.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone in short, who would simply keep going, who would not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was, perhaps, no one else in the galaxy, it could have been.
[SPEAKER_00]: The process to cross the Rubicon primaries is agonizing, in the way that only the most fundamental transformations are agonizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the sharp immediate pain of a wound received in combat, which the body at least understands and has prepared itself for.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the deep and disorienting pain of being remade at the most fundamental level.
[SPEAKER_00]: The body's most basic architecture
[SPEAKER_00]: This process kills, not rarely, warriors who have survived centuries of warfare have gone to the Rubicon and not come back from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Taken by a process that makes no allowances for reputation or experience or the length of the service record of the person on the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why Dante chose it is a question that's captured in a number of references.
[SPEAKER_00]: One account, practical and clipped, suggests simply that the chapter required its Lord Commander to remain effective in an era of warfare that was being reshaped around the capabilities of the primarist Marines.
[SPEAKER_00]: That it was a military necessity, assessed and acted upon with the same quiet decisiveness
[SPEAKER_00]: After the surgery, he was taller, broader, remade in the proportions of the primaris.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same soul, the same memory of 15 centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: How's now in a frame that the long years had not been able to diminish?
[SPEAKER_00]: The armour was rebuilt around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sacred gold refashioned to fit what he had become.
[SPEAKER_00]: The axe mortality was reforged, the petition pistol rebuilt, and the iron halo remounted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that had defined the image of the Lord of Angels,
[SPEAKER_00]: was upscaled and restored, and returned to him, peace by peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the death mask of Sangrinius was fitted back over his face, its golden features unchanged.
[SPEAKER_00]: In every account written of Dante after his crossing, by brothers who had known him for centuries, by newly arrived primarism reans, who were meeting him for the first time, by servants and priests and officials of every rank.
[SPEAKER_00]: the descriptions are of the mask.
[SPEAKER_00]: Veilith sets his pen down, somewhere near the end of his notes, and the final pages of his compilation have a quality that is different from the pages that preceded them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is softer and more personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has read the campaigns and the casualty figures and the dry language of imperial documentation, and the fragments of more personal accounts that survived when their authors did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has followed the boy who was not remarkable through everything that the
[SPEAKER_00]: And what strikes him most is not the victories.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not the demon princes fallen or the sub-sectors saved or the honor role that by now exceeds the entire history of chapters that were not even founded when Dante first put on the goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not the devastation of bow survived, or the Rubicon primerists endured, or the appointment to a role that would have broken most things capable of being broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is something simpler and harder to name than any of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the consistency.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that in archive after archive, in account after account, across 1,500 years of records assembled from sources as varied as the imperium itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same quality appears at the center of every description of this man, as reliably as the mask appears on his face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not genius or invincibility, simply the refusal to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: the same quality that walked across the salt waste towards something it had no guarantee of reaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same quality that set down the blade of the trial of Horace and clawed at the stone from the inside and stood in a listing chapel in Broken Armor and said yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Present in the boy, present in the captain, present in the chapter master and the Lord Regent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside the windows of the fortress, on its green coastal hill, the rain continues, as it has continued throughout these long months of work, patient and steady.
[SPEAKER_00]: The candles have burned low, the last page is before him, and they let writes his final line.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lord of Angels endures.