Baal

Baal is an irradiated desert world in the galactic east, homeworld of the Blood Angels and seat of their fortress-monastery, Arx Angelicum. Its surface was scoured by ancient atomic war, leaving a mutation-marked populace from which the Chapter still draws its recruits, and its small moons, Baal Secundus and Baal Primus, share in the system’s bleak inheritance.

The primarch Sanguinius raised his Legion in part from Baal’s tribes before leading it through the Great Crusade and into the Horus Heresy. Loyalist Blood Angels used the world as a rallying hub while Sanguinius’s fleet fought at Signus Prime and later at Isstvan V, and the Legion’s war ended with his death at the Siege of Terra opposing Horus. Baal’s standing as the Chapter’s home and reliquary dates from this era, contemporary with Guilliman’s Ultramar and the wider war for the Throneworld.

A splinter of Hive Fleet Leviathan descended on the Baal system; one account dates the assault to about 999.M41, another to the early 42nd millennium. Commander Dante commanded the defence and, badly wounded, slew the Swarmlord on Baal Secundus, while Chief Librarian Mephiston went with the Librarians Gaius Rhacelus and Lucius Antros to the Cruor Mountains on Baal to kill the bloodthirster Ka’Bandha; the ritual failed, and a cave-in trapped them for the rest of the battle, though a separate listing of commanders names Mephiston among them, and the two accounts do not agree. Roboute Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade fleet then relieved the system.

Arx Angelicum’s survival preserved both the Blood Angels’ fortress and their homeworld through the invasion, though the opening of the Rift left Baal stranded on the Nihilus side of the Imperium, and its rebuilding continues under that division. Baal’s significance therefore rests on its role as Sanguinius’s seat, on the Devastation and its relief, and on its standing alongside Terra, Ultramar, and the other principal anchors of that same struggle across the Imperium.