Angron

Origin & Rediscovery

Nuceria was a gladiator society. Its high castes lifted unwanted children into the arenas as a matter of standing policy, and the Nucerians who found the infant pod recognised it as a gift to that policy. Before he was old enough to understand language they had implanted the cortical Butcher's Nails into his skull — neuromodulators their own arena-medicae had refined over centuries to drive a gladiator into killing rage in combat and inflict steady agony in any other state.

He survived. He killed every gladiator they put him against. He killed every overseer that mistook his patience for compliance. By his late adolescence he had run from the arena into the mountains, gathered the slaves of half a sub-continent into an army, and was leading a rebellion that Nucerian noble forces had not yet figured out how to break.

The day his rebellion was to make its final stand, the Emperor descended in His golden ship and lifted Angron away. The rebels were left behind. The Nucerian forces massacred them at dawn. Angron, on the bridge of the Emperor's flagship, watched it happen and was given no chance to refuse.

He did not forgive that. He never forgave that. Of all the wounds the primarchs carried, his was the one that started with his rescue.

The Nails

The Imperium's gene-craft could not remove the Butcher's Nails. They had grown into him too deeply; removing them would have killed him, and he refused the surgery anyway. He chose to keep the Nails. More than that: he insisted his entire Legion be implanted with their own Nails. The World Eaters from that day forward fought in chemically and surgically enforced rage. They were brilliant in melee and useless at anything else.

He and the Emperor barely spoke afterwards. There was nothing left to say that either of them was willing to put into words.

Kill them all. Then kill the next.

— Attributed to Angron

The Heresy

Lorgar courted Angron carefully. He framed the Nails as a wound that Khorne could heal — that the Blood God's favour was the only thing that would ease the agony Angron had carried since Nuceria. Angron was sceptical. The agony was real and Lorgar's theology, at first hearing, sounded like another lie a priest was trying to sell him. He had heard a great many lies from priests.

Eventually he accepted. The pain had been with him for a century. Whatever Khorne offered, the alternative had not improved.

The World Eaters at the Heresy were pure violence. At Skalathrax, Kharn the Betrayer butchered his own brothers when they refused to keep fighting through winter. The Legion fragmented even before the Heresy ended. Angron approved. The Legion had been fragments held together by his command in the first place.

Daemonhood

At the Battle of Terra, Angron was dying. The Nails had finally caught up with the gene-craft that had kept them survivable; the constant agony was, by the campaign's end, killing him at the cellular level. Lorgar performed a ritual on the battlefield that ascended him to daemonhood, completing the pledge to Khorne that Angron himself had never quite been willing to articulate.

Angron rose as the Red Angel — a winged daemon primarch with fire for blood and the same expression of focused hatred he had worn in the Nucerian arenas as a child. For most of the next ten thousand years he remained in the warp. In the Era Indomitus he has returned to realspace multiple times — each appearance a planetary-scale slaughter, each retreat costing the Imperium more than it can spare.

Legacy

The World Eaters fragmented post-Heresy into independent warbands chasing Khornate glory. Kharn the Betrayer leads one. Periodically Angron himself returns and gathers them.

Nuceria itself was destroyed by Angron and the World Eaters during the Shadow Crusade with Lorgar — a delayed vengeance, two centuries after his rebellion fell. The slaves whose names he had carried with him since the rescue were avenged on a planet none of them lived to see. It was, in some measurable sense, the only act of his career that he had begun for himself.

I was a slave. I am a god. The galaxy will know which is louder.

— Angron the Red Angel, attributed M42