Astorath the Grim

The Redeemer of the Lost

Of all the duties laid upon the sons of Sanguinius, none is darker than the one Astorath the Grim has carried across ten thousand years. He is the High Chaplain of the Blood Angels, the Adeptus Astartes Chapter raised from the bloodline of the angelic primarch Sanguinius, and his writ runs further still: every successor Chapter sprung from that same gene-seed — the Flesh Tearers, the Angels Encarmine, the Blood Drinkers, the Lamenters — falls within his grim mandate. Where a son of the angel has succumbed to the curse in his blood, Astorath comes. He arrives unbidden, drawn as if by instinct to whatever benighted world holds a brother lost to madness, and he comes alone but for his task. The Imperium knows him by a single chilling title: the Redeemer of the Lost.

The Curse in the Blood

The curse Astorath hunts is the Black Rage, the inherited affliction that makes a Blood Angel relive the death of Sanguinius at the hands of the arch-traitor Horus during the Siege of Terra. In the grip of the Rage, an Astartes ceases to know friend from foe; he believes himself the primarch in his final hour, screaming the angel's last defiance as he dies upon the Vengeful Spirit. Such warriors cannot be cured, and they cannot be loosed upon their own battle-brothers. Long ago the Chapter founded the Death Company — a formation of the damned, painted black and marked with the red cross of the condemned, sent to spend their fury on the foe before the madness consumes what remains of their reason.

He does not relive a battle. He relives the death of a god, and there is no waking from it.

— From the catechism of the Sanguinary Priesthood

The Reading of the Eyes

Astorath alone holds the authority to judge the fallen. When he reaches a stricken brother, he looks into the man's eyes and reads there the precise depth of the curse — whether a flicker of the warrior survives beneath the storm, or whether nothing remains but Sanguinius's dying scream. To the few who still command themselves, he grants reprieve. To the rest he gives the only freedom left: a place among the Death Company and a glorious death in battle, rather than the slow horror of living on as a raving thing chained in the depths of a fortress-monastery. He has performed this mercy on more worlds than any chronicle records.

The Executioner's Axe

When battle will not claim them swiftly enough, the Redeemer claims them himself. He bears the Executioner's Axe, a vast two-handed blade of black adamantium graven with the names of the redeemed, and with it he ends those brothers whose torment has no other release. It is an act of love rendered as an act of killing — the final gift of a Chaplain to a son of the angel who can no longer be saved. Astorath does not exult in it. He carries each death as the Mask of Sanguinius carries the primarch's grief, and his face, gaunt beneath a crown of bone, has not been seen to smile in living memory.

I am the last mercy of the angel. When I lift my axe, your suffering ends — and so does your shame.

— Astorath the Grim, to a fallen brother of the Lamenters

Mercy and Death in One Figure

Astorath wears the wings of a Sanguinary High Priest and the black of mourning, and he flies to war on a jump pack wrought in the shape of an angel's pinions, so that those he comes to release see, in their last lucid moment, a winged shape descending — the very image of the primarch they are doomed to become. To the maddened brother this is no terror but a benediction. He is the angel of mercy and the angel of death folded into one black-armoured figure, and the sons of Sanguinius look upon his coming with grief and with gratitude alike.

The Endless Vigil

How long Astorath has borne the burden no record states with certainty; some say the title of Redeemer passes down, others that this same grim figure has walked the galaxy since the dark days after the Heresy. Whatever the truth, he stands beside Commander Dante, the millennia-old Lord of Baal, as one of the most venerated figures of the entire bloodline, and where he appears, the Chapter knows the harvest of the cursed has begun anew. He will keep his vigil until the gene-seed of Sanguinius is no more — reading the curse in his brothers' eyes, and granting, again and again, the only freedom the angel's dying left to his sons.