Lemartes

Lemartes, called the Guardian of the Lost, is a Blood Angels Chaplain who commands the Death Company from within the Black Rage. The Black Rage is the affliction, unique to the Blood Angels and their successor Chapters, in which a warrior relives the death of the primarch Sanguinius at the hands of Horus and is driven into a killing frenzy from which none are recorded to return. Lemartes entered the vision as others do, yet did not lose the coherence it normally strips away, and the Chapter granted him a title that exists for no one else.

Most Blood Angels who succumb to the Black Rage are stripped of rank and reason alike; they are assigned to the Death Company and spend their final battle in a state beyond command, watched over until they are lost entirely to the vision or fall in battle. Lemartes underwent the same descent but kept hold of his crozius, the badge of a Chaplain’s office, and with it the capacity to lead. The Chapter’s response was not to treat this as a cure but to formalise it: he remained a sufferer of the affliction even as he became the means by which the Chapter directs its most afflicted sons in war.

As leader of the Death Company, Lemartes occupies a position his own charges recognise before he speaks: he already stands where they are going. This gives his authority a double edge. To a Death Company Space Marine still capable of hearing an order, Lemartes offers direction amid the vision; to the Chapter overseeing him, he is also a warrior one step from the same total loss of self that claims those he commands. His standing depends on continued trust from Commander Dante, the Blood Angels’ Chapter Master, who alone signs the orders that send Lemartes and the Death Company into battle.

Lemartes is one of several Blood Angels whose survival of the Black Rage in altered form sets them apart from the rest of the Chapter, alongside Mephiston, Chief Librarian and Lord of Death, and Astorath the Grim, the Chapter’s Master of Sanctity, who judges when a Death Company Marine’s vision has run its course. Where Astorath is recorded as bringing merciful death to those beyond recall, Lemartes leads those who can still fight, and the two Chaplains’ roles are frequently described as complementary rather than overlapping. During the Devastation of Baal, when Hive Fleet Leviathan besieged the Blood Angels’ home world, Lemartes led the Death Company alongside Dante, Mephiston, and Astorath in the defence of Baal itself, a campaign that placed all four figures in the same theatre at the same crisis point in the Chapter’s history.

Lemartes remains active into the present era, continuing to lead the Death Company on Baal and beyond as the Chapter deploys its most afflicted sons wherever Dante’s wars require them. His condition has not resolved and is not expected to; accounts within the Chapter treat his continued command as an ongoing exception rather than a precedent, and no successor to his role is recorded.