Avitus

Avitus is a Blood Ravens Devastator Sergeant of the 4th Company, marked by enduring hostility toward the Imperial Guard. As a Devastator, he commands a heavy bolter team, one of the fire-support squads a Space Marine company holds in reserve to break enemy formations at range. Within the 4th Company he serves alongside Force Commander Gabriel Angelos, Chaplain Cyrus, and fellow sergeants including Tarkus and Thaddeus, a circle of contemporaries whose fortunes become bound to his own during the Kronus campaign.

His mistrust of the Astra Militarum is rooted on his home world of Typhon Primaris, where an Imperial Guard regiment is recorded as having deliberately starved the settlement in which he was raised. The episode left him convinced that Guardsmen could not be relied upon, a conviction the Chapter did nothing to correct and one that later coloured his conduct in the field. It is a detail the Blood Ravens do not draw upon in their own recruitment record of him.

That conviction hardened further on Kronus, during the assault on Victory Bay, when two of his squad brothers were killed fighting alongside Imperial Guard elements. From that point Avitus treated every Guardsman he encountered as a potential traitor, a suspicion sharp enough that other Blood Ravens in his own squad learned to keep clear of his line of fire. He nonetheless continued to serve with distinction, campaigning through both Aurelian Crusades, first under Captain Thule and later under Aramus, carrying his heavy bolter through the wider Aurelian warzone that extended to Calderis, Aurelia, Meridian 1810, and Cyrene.

During the unrest later known as the Chaos Rising affair, suspicion fell upon several of the 4th Company’s sergeants as the possible source of a security leak, and Avitus was numbered among those whose loyalty came under scrutiny. His fate is bound to that of Kronus in a further, more ambiguous way: in the Retribution period, Tarkus speaks of a friend from the Kronus campaign whom he was obliged to kill, an account that later tradition holds refers to Avitus, though the record does not state this outright. Avitus is remembered as dead by the time of these events, his end folded into the same crisis of trust between Space Marine and Guardsman that had shaped his entire service.