Astorath

Astorath the Grim is High Chaplain of the Blood Angels and Redeemer of the Lost, custodian of the Chapter’s Death Company. The Death Company gathers those battle-brothers overtaken by the Black Rage, the inherited affliction that descends from Sanguinius’s death at the Emperor’s Palace during the Siege of Terra. Astorath’s office is to attend these brothers in their final battles and, where the Rage has consumed a mind beyond any hope of return, to grant them death with the Black Axe of Mepherit rather than let them fall to dishonour or to the enemy. He makes this judgement without pretence that it is anything other than what it is.

His authority extends beyond the Blood Angels themselves. Successor Chapters descended from Sanguinius’s line, among them the Flesh Tearers, the Angels Encarmine and the Lamenters, may summon Astorath when a battle-brother too valuable to abandon and too far gone to save falls to the Black Rage. He travels a long circuit among these Chapters, arriving where the affliction has claimed its latest victim, and his winged jump pack serves as a mark of what his arrival means rather than as mere battlefield ornament. Few brothers mistake the sight of him for good news.

Astorath fought at Baal during the Devastation, when Hive Fleet Leviathan descended on the Blood Angels’ homeworld, standing alongside Chapter Master Dante, the Chief Librarian Mephiston, and the enigmatic Sanguinor in the defence of the Chapter’s seat. He holds no formal rivalry within the Chapter; his relationship with Dante is one of long cooperation, each recognising the necessity of the other’s office. His relationship with the Death Company itself is more difficult to name: he is at once their shepherd and, for those beyond recall, their executioner.

Astorath takes no pleasure in the office, and the Chapter continues to entrust it to him for that reason, judging that a Chaplain who welcomed the killing of his brothers would present a different and graver problem. He remains active in the current era, continuing to answer summons from across the Blood Angels’ successor Chapters as the Black Rage continues to claim new victims.