Gabriel Angelos

Gabriel Angelos is the Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens, who led the Chapter’s wars from Tartarus to the Aurelia subsector and Acheron. Born on Cyrene, a world from which the Blood Ravens drew recruits, he rose to command the Third Company and is recorded as the officer who carried out an Inquisitorial order of Exterminatus against his own homeworld. That act follows him through every later campaign: Inquisitors weigh his judgement against it, and his reliance on the Chapter’s Librarius, at odds with the more orthodox Codex-minded officers, has kept his leadership contested from within.

His first named campaign was the war on Tartarus in 999.M41, fought for the buried Maledictum relic against Ork invaders, the Aeldari of Farseer Macha of Biel-Tan and the Alpha Legion under Sindri Myr. There Angelos served beside the Librarian Isador Akios, whom Sindri turned to Chaos and whom Angelos killed in a duel, and beside Inquisitor Mordecai Toth, who had suspected Angelos himself of carrying the taint and who afterwards entrusted him with the daemonhammer Godsplitter. Angelos next appears as Force Commander in the Dark Crusade on Kronus, working alongside the more orthodox Captain Davian Thule of the Fourth Company, whose distrust of Librarius counsel and unorthodox tactics set the two men at odds. Thule was later gravely wounded on Calderis and entombed as a Venerable Dreadnought, and continued to serve beside Angelos on Typhon Primaris, Meridian and Cyrene.

The Aurelia subsector is the setting in which the Chapter’s internal fractures became open. Accounts place Angelos there during the defence against a Tyranid splinter fleet, renewed Ork and Aeldari pressure and the activity of traitor Space Marines, including heresy discovered inside the Blood Ravens themselves. Typhon Primaris, expected to be a victory, is remembered instead for its losses. The Chapter’s habit of acquiring lost knowledge, which outsiders regard as theft, came under scrutiny once its secrets surfaced; Angelos is recorded as Chapter Master by the later stages of these events, though accounts differ on the precise circumstances of his elevation.

At Acheron, Angelos as Chapter Master pursued the Spear of Khaine alongside the Aeldari Farseer Macha and the Ork warlord Gorgutz, an alliance of convenience between parties with long grievances against one another. Its outcome is recorded as costly for all three. Angelos remains active, and his career maps onto the Orrery graph as a single chain of worlds: Cyrene, where his authority was first tested; Tartarus, where his suspicions and friendships were broken; Kronus and Aurelia, where the Chapter’s conflicts with allies, rivals and traitors were fought; and Acheron, where the Blood Ravens’ pursuit of ancient power reached its widest scale. Where canon is silent, including on the detail of his early service and the exact chronology of his advancement, this entry does not supply it.

Angelos was born on Cyrene. An accomplished leader among his peers before his teens, he passed the Blood Trials there in partnership with a fellow aspirant, Isador Akios. Returning years later as Captain of the Third Company to preside over a new round of trials, he halted them, withdrew to his strike cruiser and sent a coded signal out of the system. Within months the Inquisition, the Imperial Navy and a Brotherhood of Grey Knights arrived; Blood Ravens and Storm Troopers fought beside the Grey Knights on the surface before cyclonic bombardment left Cyrene lifeless. During the purge Angelos found his father, Esmond, a retired Imperial Guard soldier who had become one of the rebellion’s leaders, and executed him.

Shortly after Tartarus he went to Rahe’s Paradise to conduct the Blood Trials. Biel-Tan Rangers struck at the Chapter’s psykers and at psychic aspirants, and Farseer Macha revealed that they were preserving Lsathranil’s Shield, an artefact that kept the Necrons beneath the world asleep. The Shield failed when an Aeldari warship was destroyed in the fighting; Angelos ordered the world’s Exterminatus and withdrew to Lorn V with the surviving aspirants. There he met Farseer Taldeer, set aside charges of heresy brought by Captain Ulantis of the Ninth Company, and followed her through a breach in the Webway to Arcadia, the Harlequin world of law, where after fighting Ahzek Ahriman’s Prodigal Sons he received the last Blade of Vaul and carried it back to Macha on Lorn V for use against the Necrons. The chronicles of the Dark Crusade on Kronus credit its Blood Ravens command to Davian Thule.

During the First Aurelian Crusade Angelos was in the distant Targa system, completing a victory over the T’au, when a Tyranid splinter fleet entered Subsector Aurelia. He set Force Commander Aramus of the Fourth Company three objectives while the Chapter fleet fought through a warp clouded by the Hive Mind, reached Typhon Primaris in time to relieve the Fourth Company’s last stand, landed in person and, with Aramus, killed the Hive Tyrant directing the splinter fleet.

A year later, when Aurelia returned from the warp and the Black Legion under Eliphas the Inheritor and Araghast the Pillager struck at the subsector, Angelos urged the Fourth Company and veterans of the First to fight on in defiance of Chapter Master Azariah Kyras’s order to withdraw. Branded a traitor by Kyras, he received proof of the Chapter Master’s corruption from the space hulk Judgement of Carrion and from Apothecary Galan, then led the assault on the Black Legion stronghold on Aurelia in which Eliphas was killed and the Great Unclean One Ulkair was banished before he could break free.

A decade of civil war between Angelos’s loyalists and Kyras’s faction followed, until the Inquisition condemned the subsector to Exterminatus. Angelos commended Captain Apollo Diomedes to Inquisitor Adrastia as the officer to prove the Chapter’s innocence. On Cyrene, where Kyras sought ascension as a daemon prince of Khorne, Angelos and Diomedes arrived with reinforcements; Kyras cost Angelos his right eye and both legs before Diomedes slew him. Rebuilt with augmetics, Angelos was acclaimed Chapter Master.

Before Acheron he is recorded fighting beside Lady Solaria of House Varlock against the Orks of Gorgutz on the knight world of Cyprus Ultima. As Chapter Master he ran an Inquisitorial blockade to bring the Blood Ravens to Acheron, fought the Biel-Tan Aeldari and Gorgutz’s Waaagh!, and survived an Inquisition bombardment that broke open the vault of the Spear of Khaine. When the Spear proved a trap that loosed a Bloodthirster and its daemonic host, he drove the battle barge Dauntless into a fissure in the planet’s crust and teleported clear before Acheron broke apart. Afterwards he ordered a rebuilding of the Chapter and more frequent Blood Trials across its recruiting worlds, plans overtaken within weeks by the opening of the Great Rift, which left the Blood Ravens isolated in a daemon-beset Subsector Aurelia for many years.