Sarpedon

Sarpedon is the Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, an Imperial Fists successor Chapter that broke with the Imperium and was declared Excommunicate Traitoris. He is recorded as a psychic warrior-commander who led his battle-brothers out of Imperial service, and he is the figure around whom the Chapter’s later history is organised.

The Soul Drinkers descend from the VII Legion of Rogal Dorn through the Second Founding, the division of the Legions into Chapters after the Horus Heresy. Under Sarpedon’s command the Chapter repudiated the authority of the Adeptus Terra and the Inquisition and became a hunted force, pursued by loyalist Chapters and Imperial fleets while also opposing the powers of Chaos. Accounts of the causes of the split differ in emphasis, but agree that it followed a discovery about the Chapter’s own history and duties, and that Sarpedon chose exile over submission. His campaigns thereafter are those of a fugitive host: raids to obtain war materiel and relics, and repeated clashes with Imperial pursuers. One such clash is recorded on Entymion IV, where a Crimson Fists force under Captain Reinez, later reinforced by companies led by Chaplain Inhuaca, met Soul Drinkers including the sergeant Tellos and failed to prevent them from achieving their objectives and leaving the world.

Sarpedon’s standing rests on his role as the Chapter’s leader through its separation from the Imperium, a rare case of an entire Astartes Chapter that chose neither loyalty nor open service to the Ruinous Powers. He is a contemporary of the Crimson Fists’ Chapter Master Pedro Kantor, whose Chapter was itself recovering from the Ork invasion of Rynn’s World in the late forty-first millennium, and the Imperial Fists’ own successors are among those obliged to hunt him. His present whereabouts and fate are not settled in the setting, and later tradition should be read with that uncertainty in mind.