Farith Redloss

Farith Redloss was a Calibanite Destroyer and voted-lieutenant of the Dark Angels’ Dreadwing, the Legion’s formation for destructive weapons. Born to the knightly order of the First Legion on Caliban, he served in the Great Crusade and the early Heresy period under the Lion, Lion El’Jonson. The Dreadwing’s work rested on radiation weapons, phosphex, and other means of destruction that the Legion’s other Orders did not openly claim. Redloss treated this body of weapons as a discipline requiring skill and restraint of its own, rather than as a cause for shame.

The Dreadwing is usually described as the counterpart to Holguin’s Deathwing. Where the Deathwing stood as the Legion’s heavily armoured shock element, the Dreadwing specialised in erasure. Its purpose was to remove a problem entirely, so that a world ceased to be a threat and served as a warning to others. The Lion dispatched Redloss to such worlds, and he is recorded as having burned them. Redloss made no public declarations about this work; the Dreadwing carried it out and did not explain it. The Destroyers descend from the lesson of Caliban’s forests, that certain problems can be resolved only by fire. Redloss carried that principle off-world and retained it.

Redloss’s best-attested association in the timeline is the pursuit of Konrad Curze of the Night Lords across Ultramar, a campaign fought beside the Lion. It places him among the contemporaries of the Ultramarines and their primarch, Roboute Guilliman, whose realm supplied the ground for the hunt. Accounts of the pursuit differ in detail, and Redloss’s exact part in individual engagements is not recorded. His standing as a voted-lieutenant indicates that he held his rank through the choice of his brethren in the Dreadwing rather than by appointment alone. The Lion is the only primarch tied directly to his service.

The Dreadwing let the First Legion keep its knightly character while its harshest tasks were performed elsewhere, and Redloss is one of the few Destroyers to be named in that role. His later fate is not recorded, and the dossier therefore lists his status as missing. The weapons and methods associated with the Dreadwing outlasted him. On the Orrery map his origin is bound to Caliban, and his service is anchored to the Dark Angels’ campaigns of the Great Crusade and early Heresy era.