Rafen

Rafen is a Blood Angels Space Marine, a sergeant of the Fifth Company, whose story centres on his conflict with his former battle-brother Arkio. He is a warrior of the Chapter founded on the primarch Sanguinius’s legacy, and his account is set in the 41st Millennium, when the Chapter’s home world of Baal and its wider domain are under recurrent threat.

Rafen is recorded as serving in the Fifth Company under Captain Karlaen, and as having been raised within the Chapter’s fortress-monastery tradition on Baal. His career is bound to that of Arkio, a fellow Blood Angel with whom he shared close ties of service. Accounts describe Arkio’s estrangement from the Chapter, a rupture bound up with the Blood Angels’ inherited afflictions, the Red Thirst and the Black Rage, and with the corrupting attention of Chaos. Rafen is drawn into pursuing and confronting him, and the matter also brings him into contact with senior figures of the Chapter, among them the Chaplain Lemartes.

Rafen’s significance lies chiefly in what his story shows of the Blood Angels: a Chapter whose loyalty to the Emperor is tested by a genetic flaw inherited from Sanguinius, and whose warriors must decide whether to redeem or destroy those who fall. He is a contemporary of the Chapter’s better-known leaders, including Commander Dante and the Chief Librarian Mephiston, although he holds far lower rank than either. His present status is not firmly established in the sources the Orrery draws on, and the page treats him as unknown rather than dead. On the map his anchor is Baal; on the timeline he belongs to the Blood Angels’ history in the 41st Millennium.