Apollo Diomedes

Apollo Diomedes is a Chaplain of the Blood Ravens, formerly Captain of its Honour Guard under Chapter Master Azariah Kyras. As Captain, he acted as Kyras’s public representative and champion, the visible face of the Chapter’s honours and victories. Service during the Aurelian Crusades, fought across worlds including Aurelia, left him privately convinced that many of those public glories were stage-managed rather than earned, a conviction he kept from his brothers while continuing to serve as Kyras’s foremost enforcer.

That loyalty was tested when Kyras placed the Chapter under lockdown against Gabriel Angelos, and Diomedes carried out the order without knowing its true purpose. Only later did he learn that Kyras himself was the source of the heresy he had been enforcing against, and that his years as the Chapter Master’s champion had made him the instrument of a deception aimed at the Chapter’s own past. The realisation left him in despair aboard the battle-barge Judgement of Carrion, where fellow Blood Ravens veteran Tarkus drew him back to purpose.

Diomedes then led the final assault against Kyras, killing him and halting an Exterminatus order that would have destroyed a world’s population. He also ensured that the gravely wounded Angelos was carried to an Apothecary rather than committed to a funeral pyre, an act that preserved Angelos’s life and later informed Angelos’s decision to name him Hero of the Chapter. In its wake, Diomedes relinquished the captaincy of the Honour Guard and took up the crozius arcanum, entering the Chaplaincy.

His record is not without cost: as Kyras’s champion he contributed to the destruction visited on Cyrene and on Typhon Primaris, and much of his later ministry has been directed at reversing those effects and atoning for them. That history, a former enforcer of a corrupt Chapter Master now teaching from the pulpit of a Chaplain, gives his sermons a weight among the Blood Ravens that a Chaplain without his past could not command; he is recorded as addressing his own conduct before turning to that of others. His service under Gabriel Angelos has continued into later campaigns, including action recorded at Meridian-1810, sustaining a working partnership first forged in the crisis that ended Kyras’s command.