Death Company

The Death Company is a formation of Blood Angels and successor-chapter battle-brothers who have succumbed to the Black Rage. It is not a company in the ordinary sense of Space Marine organisation, nor is it the Blood Angels Chapter itself: it is a gathering of the dying, assembled anew before battle from those judged lost to the curse, and dissolved as its members are killed. Within the Imperium of Man, the Death Company holds no fixed strength, no standing roster, and no permanent commander; it exists only for as long as the battle that will end it.

The Black Rage is held to have taken root among the Blood Angels and their gene-line at the death of the primarch Sanguinius during the Horus Heresy, when he fell to Horus aboard the latter’s flagship. The psychic shock of that death is said to have marked the gene-seed of the IX Legion and its successors, so that afflicted battle-brothers relive fragments of Sanguinius’s last battle and mistake their comrades for the traitor’s forces. Chaplains watch for the signs before battle and, where found, lead the stricken away to form the Death Company; their armour is repainted black and marked with a red saltire recalling the primarch’s wounds. On Baal, the homeworld of the Blood Angels, those few who survive an engagement and are not granted a warrior’s death are confined within the Tower of Amareo, and some are subjected to the Lestrallio Procedure, by which their ravings are recorded in the hope of understanding the affliction; the process is invariably fatal.

The Death Company has fought in numerous engagements credited to the Blood Angels, most prominently during the Devastation of Baal, when the Chapter’s homeworld was besieged and its black-armoured dead were committed to its defence alongside the wider Chapter host. The Chaplain Lemartes, known as the Guardian of the Lost, is recorded as having retained his reason despite succumbing to the Black Rage, and leads the Death Company in battle; the Blood Angels’ High Chaplain Astorath the Grim likewise fights at its side, both to drive it against the foe and to grant a final mercy to those it claims. The formation’s fate is bound to that of Sanguinius himself, whose death at Horus’s hand is remembered as the origin of the curse that creates it.

Chapters descended from the Blood Angels’ line maintain their own Death Companies and traditions surrounding them: the Flesh Tearers are recorded as sustaining an unusually large Death Company, keeping afflicted brothers alive through repeated battles rather than ending their service swiftly, while other successors mark their dead differently or, in isolated cases, decline to honour them at all. In the era following the opening of the Great Rift, the Black Rage is recorded as having spread even to the newer Primaris Space Marines inducted into the Blood Angels’ line, confirming that the affliction follows the gene-seed rather than any one pattern of recruitment, and ensuring that the Death Company remains a recurring feature of the Chapter’s wars rather than a relic of its early history.