You want me to write about the Angel. Everyone always wants the Angel. Very well — but I will tell it truly, which is more than most.
The Angel of Baal
His pod fell on Baal and her twin moons, into rust-red deserts poisoned by ancient war. The tribes of the rad-wastes found a child with wings — colossal, snow-white, feathered — and a face that even hard-living waste-tribesmen could not look upon without weeping. They called him divine. You cannot blame them. Here I set down the thing I will write once and never again: the powers of the warp watched that pod as it fell, and laid their hands upon what grew inside. The wings were not his father’s design. Meditate on the fact that the most beloved being the Imperium ever produced wore the fingerprints of its enemy, and was good anyway. There is more hope in that than in anything else I keep.
The Ninth Legion
His first campaign after the reunion was the pacification of Teghar Pentarus, where his first kill was a colossal ice stalker — he wore its black-dappled pelt as a war cloak all his life. His Blood Angels loved him without measure, and so did everyone else; he fought in crimson plate hung with loops of silver and pearls like glistening tears. And when the Legions argued over their psykers, Sanguinius stood with Magnus and the Khan as a father of the Librarius, and championed it at Nikaea.
The rest of his story is the brightest and the worst I hold. Not today.
Questions from the Archive
Where was Sanguinius found?
On Baal and its irradiated moons, where the desert tribes of the rad-wastes came to revere the winged child as a divine, angelic being.
Why did Sanguinius have wings?
The archives record that the powers of the warp laid hands upon his gestation pod as it fell to Baal — the great white wings were not part of the Emperor’s original design.
What legion did Sanguinius command?
The Ninth Legion, the Blood Angels. His first campaign was the pacification of Teghar Pentarus, and he later championed the Librarius project at the Council of Nikaea.