Merir Astelan

Merir Astelan is a Terran-born Dark Angels Chapter Master who rejected the Lion’s rule of Caliban and is numbered among the Fallen. Unlike most of the Chapter’s early members, he was not a native of Caliban. He had served in the Emperor’s name before Lion El’Jonson arrived on that world, and he is recorded as regarding this earlier service as the true basis of his standing. His place in the Dark Angels’ story is that of a figure whose authority came from Terra rather than from the Lion, which set him at odds with the new order on Caliban from the start.

His dispute with the Lion did not fade after the Lion took command. Astelan kept it alive within the circle of Luther’s influence, the faction on Caliban whose loyalty to the Lion was uneasy and eventually broke. In this setting, the Terran-born Astelan and the Caliban-born Luther are best read as two different grievances that ended on the same side. The destruction of Caliban, recorded at the Orrery’s Caliban 1112 marker, scattered the Fallen and ended the chain of command that Astelan recognised. He survived that scattering. The Emperor’s Terra had raised him to command, but with the fall of the world where he had held it, the authority behind that command no longer existed in any form he could appeal to.

Astelan is recorded as having maintained for ten thousand years that the Lion, and not he, was the traitor. The Chapter’s Interrogator-Chaplains treat this statement as part of their record of the Fallen’s claims, and they do not accept it. Accounts describe him as having been held in cells, where he gave his account, and as having been hunted by the Chapter on account of the disagreement. These are the same methods the Chapter, later called the Unforgiven, applies to the Fallen in general: pursuit, capture and interrogation, with the aim of learning what the Fallen know and what they still claim. Contemporaries in this record include the Lion, Luther and the Chapter’s Interrogator-Chaplains. The Lion is the man he accuses, Luther is the figure around whom the Fallen gathered, and the Chaplains are the ones who take his testimony.

In the current era Astelan is listed as active. He holds no fortress, and the Dark Angels have long since taken the Rock as their base in Caliban’s place. His importance is not tactical. His insistence on his own account shows how the Fallen remain a danger to the Chapter without possessing a stronghold: their threat is a rival version of events, and the Chapter has never been able to close the question. Where the surviving record is thin, the Orrery does not fill the gap. What is known of his campaigns and his movements since Caliban’s destruction is limited to what is stated above.