Caliban

Caliban was a forested death world and homeworld of the Dark Angels Legion, shattered when Luther’s rebellion turned it against Lion El’Jonson. A death world is a planet whose environment is openly hostile to human settlement; on Caliban this took the form of vast forests stalked by monstrous native predators, the Great Beasts. Before the Imperium’s arrival, the planet’s scattered human population organised into knightly orders whose purpose was to hunt these creatures, a tradition that shaped the culture the primarch Lion El’Jonson inherited when he rose to lead the Order and, later, the Dark Angels Legion during the Great Crusade.

When the Lion departed Caliban to campaign at the Emperor’s side, he left the world in the care of his oldest friend and rival, Luther, as regent of the Order. Luther’s resentment at his own passing-over curdled, during the Horus Heresy, into susceptibility to Chaos, and he turned Caliban’s garrison against the Order’s remaining loyalists in a civil war fought while the Lion was engaged on the Thramas Crusade against Night Lords forces. The Lion’s return brought a reckoning: fighting between the two camps, compounded by orbital bombardment and a Warp storm drawn in by the violence, broke the planet apart. Only The Rock, an asteroid-sized fragment already fortified as the Order’s stronghold, survived to become the mobile fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels thereafter.

Caliban’s destruction did not end the conflict it began. Knights loyal to Luther who escaped the world’s ruin became the Fallen Angels, Chaos-corrupted survivors scattered across the galaxy and hunted ever since by the Dark Angels and their Unforgiven successor chapters, who regard the atonement of that failure as a standing duty. Cypher, an enigmatic renegade of disputed origin and allegiance, is bound up with this same unfinished history, moving through the galaxy independent of both the Fallen and the chapter that pursues them. Azrael, Supreme Grand Master of the Dark Angels in the present era, directs that hunt from The Rock, the last physical remnant of Caliban and the closest thing the chapter now has to a homeworld.