Deathwing

The Deathwing is the First Company of the Dark Angels, the veteran formation trusted with the Chapter’s Inner Circle and the hunt for the Fallen. Within the Imperium it ranks among the most storied Space Marine formations, composed entirely of Terminator-armoured veterans and standing, along with the Chapter’s Ravenwing, outside the standard structure prescribed by the Codex Astartes. Its allegiance is to the Emperor and to the Dark Angels alone; command of the company rests with a Grand Master, a position presently held by Belial.

The Deathwing traces its lineage to the Great Crusade, when it was raised, by most accounts around 830.M30, from the remnants of the Host of Crowns as one of the Hexagrammaton, the six specialised Wings that Lion El’Jonson instituted by combining Terran Legion practice with the knightly orders of his home world of Caliban. Its warriors swore that none would ever be left on the field in the hands of the enemy, accepting death before dishonour or retreat, and the company became renowned both as a line-breaking force that shattered enemy formations and as a lifeguard cadre protecting senior officers, including detachments charged with the inner citadels of Caliban and of Gramarye.

During the Horus Heresy, heavy losses among the Dark Angels’ officer corps left the Deathwing’s veterans with growing authority over the Legion’s Council of Masters, a dominance that persisted into the Chapter’s later history. The company is based, with the rest of the Dark Angels, aboard The Rock, the Chapter’s void-borne fortress-monastery, and its structure is mirrored, under different names, by the equivalent formations of the Unforgiven, the Dark Angels’ successor Chapters.

Advancement into the Deathwing is also an initiation into the Chapter’s guarded history: a newly raised veteran begins to learn of Luther’s betrayal on Caliban and of the Fallen, the renegades still hunted across the galaxy, marking entry into the first ring of the Inner Circle. Deeper knowledge, and the title of Deathwing Knight, is reserved for those who progress further still within that circle.

The company is distinguished by bone-white armour, a departure from the Dark Angels’ dark green and the Legion’s original black; accounts differ on its origin, variously tracing it to a Terminator squad that painted their war-plate in expectation of death before freeing a recruitment world from a Genestealer infestation, or to a later need to mark the First Company apart from the Heretic Astartes during a campaign to reclaim lost recruiting grounds. Its insignia is a broken-bladed variant of the winged sword borne by the rest of the Chapter.