Raldoron

Raldoron was First Captain of the Blood Angels Legion and Equerry to the primarch Sanguinius, and later the first Chapter Master of the Blood Angels. As First Captain he directed the companies of the Ninth Legion in the field, while Azkaellon commanded the Sanguinary Guard. The Legion’s origins lie on Baal, and Raldoron is recorded as having risen within it as a warrior whom Sanguinius trusted for his understanding of the temperament of the Legion’s battle-brothers rather than for any personal prominence. That judgement made him the primarch’s closest instrument of command and the officer best placed to translate his intentions into orders.

During the Horus Heresy, Raldoron’s name is bound to two places. At Signus Prime he held the line during the Ragefire, the outbreak of the Legion’s inherited rage that threatened its survival as a fighting force. Later he held a sector of the walls of Terra during the Siege of the Imperial Palace, when the defence became a prolonged and grinding attrition. His contemporaries in these events include Azkaellon of the Sanguinary Guard, the primarch Rogal Dorn, who directed the Palace’s defence, and Sanguinius himself, whose death aboard the Vengeful Spirit removed the Legion’s leader at the moment of its greatest need.

After the siege Raldoron inherited a Legion whose primarch was dead and whose warriors were consumed by grief. Corswain and Bjorn are recorded as finding him too shaken to commit the Legion to a crusade of vengeance. He nevertheless spoke in favour of the pursuit advocated by Dorn at the reconstruction council, and then left. When the Codex Astartes divided the Legions into Chapters, Raldoron became the first Chapter Master of the Blood Angels. The office carried little prestige and considerable burden, and his task was to teach a shattered Legion how to function as a Chapter without its primarch. Accounts of his later life are sparse, and his present status is recorded as missing rather than confirmed.