Nassir Amit

Nassir Amit, known as the Flesh Tearer, was Captain of the Fifth Company of the Blood Angels Legion and later the founder of the Flesh Tearers Chapter. He belonged to the Legion’s Baal-born officer corps and is recorded as a commander who kept the uncurbed aggression that had marked the formation before its primarch (commanding gene-father), Sanguinius, took up its leadership. Although the Legion adopted more disciplined conduct under Sanguinius, Amit preserved its predatory habits and openly displayed the Red Thirst, the innate genetic affliction that provokes sudden and overwhelming bloodlust. His Fifth Company therefore became associated with a harsher style of war than the restrained ideal the primarch sought to cultivate elsewhere in the Legion.

During the Horus Heresy, Amit served in the Blood Angels’ campaigns and is recorded as having survived the fighting on Signus Prime and, later, on Terra, where the Legion stood among the defenders of the Imperial Palace as the war reached its climax. His conduct in these actions earned him a reputation that unsettled many of his battle-brothers. Sanguinius, however, did not regard the captain as an enemy of the Legion. Accounts hold that the primarch recognised in Amit the plainest expression of the bloodlust that lay beneath the whole Legion, and that he treated the captain as a reflection of a flaw shared by all his sons rather than as an aberration. In terms of the map and timeline, Amit’s career therefore runs from Baal, the Legion’s home world and the centre of the Baal sphere, through the Signus campaign to the defence of Terra at the close of the Heresy.

In the reorganisation that followed the civil war, Amit rejected the notion that the Codex Astartes, the standardised military doctrine that divided the Legions into smaller Chapters, could curb the Legion’s genetic disposition. He gathered his own followers into an autonomous force and adopted his sobriquet as the name of the newly established Flesh Tearers Chapter, whose recruiting grounds and fortress-monastery were established on Cretacia within the Baal system. He is remembered as the Chapter’s first Chapter Master, and later tradition places him among the Blood Angels’ earliest successor founders. His contemporaries in the Legion included Sanguinius and the other captains who took part in the Signus and Terra campaigns, and the Flesh Tearers’ relationship with the Blood Angels remained close throughout the later millennia.

Amit is recorded as dead, and his name survives chiefly through the Chapter he founded. The Flesh Tearers inherited both his cognomen and the persistent genetic affliction of the Blood Angels lineage. Rather than eliminating the defect, later generations continued to experience the Red Thirst, and Amit’s severe temperament was preserved as the Chapter’s defining standard. Accounts differ on the details of his death, and this entry records only what is attested of his career: his command of the Fifth Company, his survival of the Heresy, and his founding of the Flesh Tearers.