Azkaellon

Azkaellon was the commander of the Sanguinary Guard, the gilded bodyguard of Sanguinius, primarch of the Blood Angels Legion of the Adeptus Astartes. The Guard was the Legion’s most visible expression of loyalty to its primarch, and Azkaellon is recorded as the one member of it whom Sanguinius ordered to survive its destruction. His career links Baal, the Legion’s home world, with Signus Prime and Terra, and it carries the Blood Angels’ traditions of ceremony from the Great Crusade into the later ages of the Imperium.

As the Guard’s commander, Azkaellon stood closest to Sanguinius in the Legion’s ranks. The Guard fought in gold and in the primarch’s immediate company, and its purpose was defined by his person rather than by any single theatre of war. Azkaellon’s approach is remembered as rigid where that of his contemporary Raldoron was flexible. It emphasised ceremony and the conviction that the primarch himself was the Legion’s true standard. The Signus campaign and the war on Terra tested that conviction. On Terra, during the Horus Heresy, Sanguinius confronted Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit, and the Guard was destroyed in the fighting around that confrontation. The Guard’s dead are recorded as having fallen there, and Azkaellon is not among them.

His survival is described as the result of a command, not of mercy or chance, and he is recorded as regarding it thereafter as a duty imposed upon him rather than one he had sought. Accounts differ on the detail of his last hours beside Sanguinius, and the circumstances of his later fate are not clearly established, which is why his status is listed as missing. He is generally placed among the survivors of the Legion after the death of its primarch, alongside the wounded Blood Angels who carried the Legion forward.

Later tradition holds that Azkaellon instructed the successor Chapters in how to maintain a Sanguinary Guard once Sanguinius was gone. The golden death masks worn by the Guard are associated with this teaching. They express his position that some member of the Guard must always survive, and that the survivors should stand as a pledge of the Guard’s purpose. On the Orrery map his anchor is Baal, and the timeline places him within the Sanguinary Guard entries of the Horus Heresy. His neighbours in the graph are Sanguinius, Raldoron, Signus Prime and Terra, and the Blood Angels and their successor Chapters give the wider context.