Flesh Tearers

The Flesh Tearers are a Second Founding successor Chapter of the Blood Angels, raised in the 31st Millennium under Nassir Amit. Loyal to the Emperor, they inherited their progenitors’ gene-seed flaws of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst in an unusually severe form, a burden that has made them among the most feared and mistrusted of the Emperor’s Space Marines even by their own allies.

The Chapter is based on Cretacia, a death world of primordial jungles and reptilian megafauna, whose isolated human population supplies recruits noted for their strength and hardiness. Like the Blood Angels, the Flesh Tearers are organised for close-quarters war and favour chainswords and power weapons over sustained ranged fire, a preference sharpened by the fury that runs in their blood.

After its founding, the Chapter spent some three millennia on crusade aboard the battle barge Victus under Amit, who later settled his warriors on Cretacia in the belief that the world’s savagery matched their own nature. Over the following millennia the Chapter’s gene-seed flaw worsened, and by the Kallern Massacres of the 36th Millennium the Inquisition had opened a standing investigation into the Flesh Tearers’ conduct in battle, where allies and even civilians have on occasion been caught up in their bloodlust. Relations with other Imperial forces have often been strained; a massacre committed during the Eclipse Wars broke trust with the Space Wolves at the battle known as Honour’s End, and it was only later, during the Thirteenth Black Crusade at Cadia, that Wolf Lord Ragnar Blackmane helped restore ties between the two Chapters.

By the era of the Devastation of Baal the Flesh Tearers, led by Chapter Master Gabriel Seth, had been reduced to roughly four companies, far below their proper strength. In the crusade’s aftermath they received a substantial infusion of Primaris Space Marines drawn from Sanguinius’s lineage, restoring their numbers even as the future course of their inherited curse remains uncertain. Within the wider Sanguinary Brotherhood of Blood Angels successors, the Flesh Tearers stand as the starkest reminder of what their primarch’s gene-flaw can become.