Ka’Bandha

Ka’Bandha is an Exalted Bloodthirster of Khorne, recorded as the adversary of the primarch Sanguinius and the Blood Angels at Signus Prime and Terra. A daemon rather than a legionary, he serves the Blood God and is defined in the wider story almost entirely by his enmity towards the Ninth Legion of the Space Marines. He is styled the Angel’s Bane, and his name is tied to the Blood Angels’ long-standing affliction of thirst and rage.

His first recorded confrontation with Sanguinius took place at Signus Prime, in the period of the Great Crusade, when the Blood Angels were engaged on the Signus front. There Ka’Bandha is said to have killed hundreds of the Legion with a whip and to have broken the primarch’s legs. He is also credited with inflicting the Ragefire upon the Ninth Legion, and later tradition holds that the Legion has suffered from thirst ever since. Sanguinius nevertheless banished him from the material realm. Khorne was displeased by this outcome and, according to the accounts, set a condition for a second chance: Ka’Bandha was to take five hundred Ninth Legion souls within the sight of Sanguinius, the Angel. The account thus casts the Bloodthirster as a servant bound to a debt as well as an aggressor.

The second encounter came on Terra during the Siege, when Ka’Bandha appeared among the Warmaster’s hosts at the Eternity Gate and came close to completing the count demanded of him. Sanguinius drew him into a duel and broke his back. Weaker daemons consumed what remained of him, and he withdrew to his own domain in fury. Together the two encounters place Ka’Bandha in two settings connected in the Orrery timeline: Signus Prime in the Great Crusade, and the Imperial Palace during the Horus Heresy, where Sanguinius fought among the contemporaries of Horus and the Blood Angels’ defenders of the Gate.

His banishments have not proved permanent. Ka’Bandha is recorded as returning in the 41st millennium in connection with Khartas and Kalagazaar, and with a skull-rune that he marked across Baal Primus in Tyranid bone, which links him to the Blood Angels’ home system. Accounts differ on the full extent of these later appearances, and he remains a daemon whose defeats are followed by return. Within the Blood Angels’ story he stands as the rival of Sanguinius and the source of a pursuit that the Ninth Legion’s successors continue to suffer.