Signus Campaign

"If one wishes to go unseen by devils, one should not place their faith in angels."

- Attributed to the Remembrancer Ignace Karkasy, 31st Millennium

The Signus Campaign was a major Imperial military action conducted at the close of the Great Crusade in the early 31st Millennium by the Blood Angels Legion to cleanse the Signus Cluster — a triple star system of the Segmentum Ultima near to the galactic centre. The Primarch Sanguinius' IX Legion was ordered by the Warmaster Horus to cleanse the 7 worlds and 15 moons of the Signus Cluster of xenos invaders and release the humans settled there from their xenos-overlords. Unaware of Horus' perfidy and determination to betray the Emperor of Mankind, Sanguinius willingly obeyed his brother Primarch and immediately set out for this volatile region of space. Unbeknownst to the Blood Angels, they were blindly walking into a deadly trap, for the Signus Cluster had fallen prey to agents of the Ruinous Powers and become a veritable Realm of Chaos -- a system of hellish Daemon Worlds under the rule of a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh known as Kyriss the Perverse. Horus hated and feared Sanguinius more than any of his brothers and wove many strategies to ensnare or slay him, though all ultimately failed. The Warmaster hoped to turn the Blood Angels' hidden genetic curses, later known as the Black Rage and the Red Thirst, against them in order to enthrall them to the Blood God Khorne and turn yet another Space Marine Legion to his cause. Ultimately, Horus' plan would fail but a darkness would forever after stain the souls of the Blood Angels Legion. This terrible curse would continue to manifest in the centuries to come as the great Flaw that would afflict the Blood Angels and all of their Successor Chapters.

Dark Secrets
When Warmaster Horus, the greatest of the Emperor's genetic sons, fell to the temptations of the Chaos Gods and became swayed by their promises of power, he sought to sway his brother Primarchs to his cause. Horus and Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels Legion, had fought many campaigns by each other's side. Their relationship was so close it had even incited jealousy amongst their brother Primarchs on occasion. But in his black heart the Warmaster knew, Sanguinius would never willingly betray their father, and so, he had formulated an audacious plan to either convert the Blood Angels Legions to his cause or utterly destroy them. Many decades earlier, the Warmaster had discovered a carefully guarded secret when he fought alongside Sanguinius' Legion in a xenocide campaign on the world of Melchior.

Horus had come upon his brother Primarch in a sunken ruin of an alien chapel and had witnessed the unthinkable - Sanguinius murdering one of his own Astartes. Sanguinius explained his actions to his bewildered brother. He had discovered that within his own bio-type there was a trait that lay buried and waited to be awakened. During the Great Crusade, this strange affliction had begun to manifest, affecting some of the Blood Angels Legionaries over the course of several decades. The story was always the same -- a warrior of the IX Legion in the throes of battle eventually succumbed to a rage that continued to build and build until his reason was lost. When a Blood Angels Battle-Brother succumbed to this affliction, his humanity would be stripped away until only his feral core remained and all the blood-crazed Astartes wanted to do was kill and kill, satiating himself with blood and more blood. At the end, at the very worst of it, he lost every last piece of himself, until death was a kindness.

Fortunately, only a handful of Astartes had been afflicted over the course of two Terran centuries of continuous conflict. Most would perish in battle without anyone taking note of their growing insanity. But if their degeneration became noticeable, then Sanguinius himself, or the Sanguinary Guard's commander Azkaellon, would usually be the one to end the life of the afflicted Battle-Brother. Yet, in the closing days of the Great Crusade, the outbreaks of this affliction began to occur more often. Sanguinius feared that, in time, this affliction would grow to encompass every member of the IX Legion.

Sanguinius had been aware of the flaw in his genome for several years, keeping the truth from the Emperor and his fellow Primarchs. He could not speak of this to any of the others, for to do so would diminish his Legion in the eyes of his brothers and the Imperium. Some of his brother Primarchs would see it as a weakness and seek to turn this truth against him. Sanguinius was afraid to confide in his father the Emperor for he could not take the risk of being responsible for the erasure of the Blood Angels from Imperial history like the II and XI Legions. He was determined to not see a third empty plinth erected beneath the roof of the Hegemon in the Imperial Palace on Terra as the IX Legion’s only memorial. Sanguinius continued to search for a solution but continued to fail in this endeavour. Some of the Angel’s sons had learned a measure of the truth, but only Azkaellon, First Captain Raldoron, the IX Legion’s Master Apothecary on Baal and a few others were fully aware of the extent of this affliction. They were united with Sanguinius in finding a way of repairing this flaw. Horus swore to his brother that he would never speak of this matter to anyone, even their father. He would keep this promise for as long as Sanguinius wished him to. The Angel was touched by his brother's gesture and expressed his gratitude. The Warmaster solemnly vowed to help Sanguinius deal with this matter, however long it took. Little did they know at the time, that one day, the Warmaster would take full advantage of this knowledge and attempt to turn the Blood Angels' flaws against them.

Sanguinius Betrayed
Using his knowledge of the Blood Angels' genetic flaws, Horus had found a way to sway his 'beloved' brother's Legion to his cause. The Warmaster ordered Sanguinus to gather his entire Legion and make for the Signus Cluster, a system located in the Ultima Segmentum near the Eastern Fringe. His Legion, was to cleanse the 7 worlds and 15 moons of Signus of xenos invaders and release the humans thereon from their xenos-overlords. To further entice Sanguinius, the Warmaster informed him that he had found the means by which the Blood Angels would be able to excise the darkness from within their souls, and rid themselves of their genetic flaws. If Sanguinius obeyed the Warmaster's command in this matter, then Horus promised him that the Blood Angels would find a new freedom. Sanguinius had no reason to doubt Horus, for they were as close as two brothers could be. Many on their fellow Primarchs were even jealous of the closeness between the pair. Sanguinius relished the opportunity to once again prove the value of their bond, and so, the Blood Angels gathered in their entirety and duly set course for the Signus Cluster, unaware that they were heading into the most foul of traps.

Signus Daemonicus
For untold generations, the Signus Cluster had been a centre for human civilisation. Great Hive Cities littered the seven worlds and huge industrial complexes burrowed into the fifteen moons. But amongst the uncounted millions on Signus lurked sinister Chaos Cultists. Agents sent to the world by Horus from Davin, and other Cult Worlds, infested the rabble, and in their numbers hid the witch-cabals that had summoned the Daemons to Signus. When they received a signal from Horus they rose up in violent insurrection and seized power. Chaosdaemonsstalkedthe Hives and established foul palaces across the entire system The human population was enslaved, reduced to fodder for the minions of Chaos. Powerful summoning spells by the witch-cabals allowed the daemons free reign over Signus. In addition to this, thousands of Psykers had been possessed.

Signus became a Realm of Chaos, and a Domain of Daemons. Kyriss the Perverse, a Greater Daemon of the Pleasure God Slaanesh, ruled the Signus system. The 7 worlds and 15 moons were in thrall to this mighty daemon and its teeming hordes. The daemons were aided by the machinations of Chaos Cultists. These bands of madmen opened their worlds to the creatures of the Warp, conjuring powerful summoning spells and offering themselves up for possession. The rest of the human population of Signus had been annihilated or enslaved, their fate to be consumed by the horrors of the Warp. The entire system became a charnel house, a place of evil and a home for the creatures of the Immaterium. There was never so base a betrayal as this one, for Sanguinius looked to Horus as a brother, and never would have believed he would be sacrificed to the foul denizens of the Warp.

Dire Portents
Not long after arriving in-system, the Blood Angels discovered wrecked spacecraft drifting beyond the edges of the Signus Cluster. The IX Legion's scouts had found the wreckage of more than a dozen different craft drifting in the gravity shadow of the world known as Phoros. Civilian haulers, defence force monitors, and shuttles. Many of these spacecraft were not even Warp-capable. Their trajectory suggested that they were fleeing from the inner worlds of the system. Soon the Imperial fleet was rife with rumour, as stories began to circulate about something unusual that had been discovered by the Blood Angels’ scout vessel Numitor. Docking with the Red Tear, the frigate Numitor had had the docking cylinder to itself, and as a precaution all auxiliaries and non-combatant mortal crewmen were dismissed to other duties. Meros and a complement of fellow Astartes Apothecaries were summoned by a brisk summons with little explanation as to the reason. Meros wondered why armed Battle-Brothers were needed to escort a medical party on the deck of the Primarch’s own flagship, but no explanations were forthcoming.

Multiple medicae had been gathered from amongst the Blood Angels fleet and assigned number of bodies to examine, and were then to pool their findings. Donning their full suits of Power Armour, the Apothecaries were to observe all biohazard procedures and report anything anomalous immediately. Each Apothecary found four coffins set aside for him to examine. The medicae wondered why the corpses had been brought aboard the Red Tear, but it was standard operating procedure. The Red Tear had the most advanced medicae labs and technical facilities of any starship in the IX Legion's fleet. As they opened the container and examined each body in turn, the Apothecaries quickly discovered heaps of clothing, curiously laid out in the shape of a person. Taking samples of blood they discovered that the blood had somehow been altered. The vial of vitae, when held up to the light, showed that instead of crimson fluid, the matter within the crystal tube was thick and sluggish, an oily paste almost purple in colour. Upon closer scrutiny of the corpses, the Apothecaries quickly discovered that the bodies lacked rigidity as they were sunken and shriveled in a way that suggested a peculiar form of decay. Much to their shock, they discovered that that there were no bones within the corpses. They were little more than bags of skin and meat in the shape of a human being, misshapen under the weight of their own mass. Even more strangely, the Apothecaries could not figure out how the bones had been removed. The assembled Apothecaries were ordered by First Captain Raldoron to not discuss what they had seen without permission from their commanding officers.

Holst
As the Blood Angels continued their investigation of the scattered fleet of wrecked vessels, they could not figure out why these craft were even in that particular zone of space. The people of these ships had been obviously so afraid that they willingly sought out the embrace of deep space in order to escape whatever horror they had witnessed. By order of the Primarch, a task force of Blood Angels Astartes were to travel ahead to Signus VI, the Hive World known as Holst by its people, to discern the fate of the people of that planet. Meros and a squad of Blood Angels, accompanied by three Word Bearers Astartes, who acted as official observers by order of the Warmaster, were sent down to the surface of the planet to investigate. But en route, their mortal pilot was overcome by the nightmarish visions that continued to plague him and all of the unaugmented humans aboard the IX Legion's fleet since it had entered the Signus System. The pilot succumbed to madness and shot the Servitors, the rest of the mortal crew and himself, forcing Meros to pilot the Stormbird and make a crash landing.

Once they arrived on the surface of the planet, the Astartes quickly realised they had no communication with their fleet and would not be missed for at least ten hours. They decided to go ahead and explore the planet’s surface, investigating the outer wards of Holst-Prime Hive. During their investigation, the small detachment of Space Marines heard the sounds of gunfire. The Space Marine on point, Brother Xagan of the Blood Angels, had somehow mysteriously disappeared down some ragged sink-hole within one of the habitat buildings. The only sign of his passing was a discarded Umbra Ferrox Pattern Bolter, vapour still curling from its muzzle. As they continued their investigation, the Blood Angels became separated from the three Word Bearers that had been accompanying them, just as they encountered enemy contact from unknown vectors. When Apothecary Meros and the Blood Angels caught up to their compatriots, they discovered a dead Word Bearer Space Marine. Dark, oily fluid stained the the slate-coloured Power Armour of the dead Astartes. With a start, Meros realised that the purple fluid was the Space Marine's blood -- the strange vitae filled his thoughts, his senses. It was the same strange blood he had discovered in the boneless corpses aboard the Red Tear. Suddenly, and without warning, the Word Bearers' Captain immediately interposed himself between the Apothecary and the mutilated remains of his Battle-Brother.

As the contingent of Space Marines attempted to escape from the outer wards of Holst-Prime, the hive city itself came alive, attacking the Astartes in the form of living metallic constructs formed from fragments of wreckage. Surrounded and outnumbered, the small task force was only saved by the timely intervention of Captain Amit and the Blood Angels' 5th Company. Receiving the strange, but unbelievable reports from the survivors that had been on the planet’s surface, Sanguinius ordered the destruction of the cursed planet. Priming their cyclonic torpedoes and megaweapon systems, the entirety of the Blood Angels fleet bombarded Holst, subjecting it to the rarely used punishment of Exterminatus. Like a tormented animal, the planet ended with a tortured scream that even the void could not silence.

A Shadow Falls
In the days since the Blood Angels fleet passed inside the orbit of Signus VI, and left that world killed and broken, the mood of the Legion shifted. To make matters worse, while the mission to Holst-Prime Hive was undertaken, word had come to the Blood Angels of the final communication from the starship Helios, lost with all hands under strange circumstances. The fleet continued to explore the seemingly accursed system, moving at battle speed, towards the inner planets and a direct speed course to Signus Prime. The command had been passed through every vessel, every company. The Primarch’s patience was wearing thin, and the orders from Warmaster Horus – to oust the enemy that had taken the Signus Cluster – were still their prime motive. Ever since entering the Signus System the Blood Angels' had been assaulted by strange occurrences that remained unexplained. A malevolent influence attacked the minds of the non-Astartes personnel. The iron-will and training of the Space Marines protected them from this attack, as the non-Space Marine crews and auxiliaries faced the fury of Chaos for the first time in their lives. There were hundreds reports received throughout the fleet of crewmembers and a contingent of Remembrancers committing suicide, unable to cope with the malevolent influence of Chaos in their fragile minds.

Survivors
Detecting a faint Imperial beacon, the Blood Angels later set down upon the surface of the Agri-World of Signus V, called Scoltrum by its inhabitants, to investigate whether or not there were any survivors aboard a crashed Signusi frigate called the Stark Dagger, which had attempted to flee from the core worlds of the system. Though Chapter Master Raldoron and Captain Amit suspected a trap, they wouldn't let this stop them from investigating. Captain Nakir of the 24th Company had been given the order and ships were deployed. Despite being devoid of all life, the Blood Angels managed to discover and rescue a small band of human survivors which included a Pariah amongst their number. The survivors informed the Astartes that the Stark Dagger had been a part of the Signus Cluster’s outer defence squadron. Unfortunately, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to flee and crash-landed upon the surface of the doomed planet. They told the Blood Angels that they had been assailed by indescribable horrors, all things made out of fangs and wings. Horrors that you couldn't lay your eyes upon for too long.

As the Blood Angels attempted to evacuate the survivors they were set upon by a large group of Daemonettes and their daemonic mounts. Though a small number of Astartes were lost, they were able to fight their way back to their Stormbirds and make good their escape. Once back aboard the Red Tear, Captain Nakir was debriefed by Primarch Sanguinius and an assemblage of the Legion's senior ranking officers. Captain Nakir completed his report to the assemblage and there was obvious dissent, even towards the battle-brother’s unembellished description of the enemy engagement on the fifth planet. When inquired as to why he did not bring back one the fell creatures for examination, Captain Nakir informed them that they had attempted to, but the corpses melted, until all that remained was a toxic residue unfit to be analysed.

The survivors of the Stark Dagger were also examined and questioned. There was nothing unusual about them, save that they were still alive while every other Signusi aboard had been left as boneless corpses. When questioned about the nature of their attackers, they spoke of armies of beings that were a mixture of life forms. Humanoid-animal amalgams, winged beasts and things of fluid flesh. An army of daemons. Disbelieving these tales, some of the Blood Angels assumed that the sightings of these so-called daemons must have been a result of mental manipulation caused by some sort of drug or chemicals. The survivors believed in what they had seen. They also said that these creatures were led by an inhuman warlord, a being that called itself a "Bloodthirster", a killer that reveled in violence and suffering. A second leader, another creature, was also known to exist.

Some of the survivors also spoke of a human, a man name Bruja. He had come to them claiming to be an agent of the Imperium, but appeared to have been responsible for the collapse of the Signusi government. He was able to perform this feat through the use of magick, allegedly summoning a creature of the warp, a perverse mastermind that conducted terrible acts of desecration and cruelty. Some of the Astartes tried to discount these tales as stark ravings of troubled minds that could not grasp the scope of something alien. Yet no one present at the assembly could explain the troubling phenomena that the Blood Angels had encountered since arriving in the Signus System. They couldn't be quick to deny the words of the humans. Whatever the origin of the enemy forces they had encountered in the Signus Cluster, they were still the enemy. Captain Nakir had shown that the Astartes could fight them and kill them. That was all that mattered. Their orders from the Warmaster had not changed. They were to liberate this system from the hands of those who had taken it. Whatever name they wished to give it, xenos daemon or whatever, the Blood Angels faced something outside the experience of any son of Baal or Terra.

Dark Tidings
The warships of the Blood Angels Legion finally moved upon the capital world of Signus Prime. Mysteriously, the two moons of the third planet were gone, destroyed through unconventional means. The satellites had simply been stolen from their orbits, lost to the unknown; and with them had gone shipyards, barracks and manufactories for the Signus Cluster’s defence forces. The fate of the defence forces themselves were much clearer. The shells of their fleet were cast adrift across the orbit of the planet in a thick, ragged shroud. A cowl of dense wreckage from countless obliterated vessels and orbital complexes hung close to the edge of the atmospheric interface – military and civilian ships alike, everything from suborbital wing-shuttles never designed to venture beyond the stratosphere to interstellar juggernaut haulers, all had been killed close to the capital world and left where they fell. Plasma fires still burned in the cores of some wrecks, leaving streamers of radiation in their wake. Great slicks of debris flowed from the insides of cracked hulls and thickened the stew of fragments. The dead ships were not just the fallout from the brutal beheading of an entire colony world. They were more than the spilled blood forgotten by a careless killer. They were more than grave markers. The silent ships had been turned into a barbed shoal of debris, which any who approached would be forced to penetrate if they meant to make planetfall. And more than that, they were there as a silent, monumental threat: vessels broken and skinned alive, hung dead in the sky like the bleeding trophies of a wild killer.

The horror might have been enough to chill the heart of even the most experienced of space’s cold warriors, but this exhibition was not the end of the bleak, voiceless message. For where there were thousands of murdered ships there were ten thousand times that number of human dead drifting bloated and frozen in the vacuum. The pilots of the interceptors brought the images to the Red Tear’s command deck, and the primarch looked upon them without speaking, sorrow and anger robbing him of words. Others who saw the same picts were similarly silenced, unable to frame the grotesque reality of what lay before them. Each body had been brutalised in a way that went beyond understanding, their bones subsumed from the meat of them, stolen away like the vanished moons by the same unknowable process that had claimed lives on Holst and elsewhere. Millions of corpses floated in fusions of flesh, twisted into repulsive monuments, glossy with coatings of frozen blood. They had been compacted into dolmens and rings, carved like soapstone. Some of the shapes had rigid angles and toothed spires made of cut limbs; others were flattened into discs and wicked curves, meat-red and shimmering. The sign of the brazen eight-pointed star that had burned across the world of Phorus was also repeated, over and over, like an offering that only something with eyes as large as mountains would be able to see.

Without warning, malevolent energies surged across the void, attacking the minds of the psychically sensitive crews. Navigators and Astropaths were crippled or killed in the initial onslaught, their brains fried by the dark malice of Chaos. The crew-serfs all around the Astartesw began to scream in a great cacophony. The Blood Angels fleet had been ready for every form of attack save one. A cry from Signus Prime that went beyond a voice and sound exploded out into space towards the assembled vessels of the IX Legion. A vast hurricane of psychic shock, created from the bottled murder-essence of millions of surrendered souls, resonated out from the shrouded world. It swept across the crimson starships in a shuddering, immaterial wave. Void Shields could not halt the ethereal power of it, and the mere matter of adamantium hulls and plasteel bulkheads were penetrated as easily as if they had been made of paper. The sheer, monstrous force of the shockwave battered at every living mind aboard the ships of the Blood Angels flotilla.

The transhumans of the Legiones Astartes were able to meet this psychic attack and weather its raw power and turn it. It was only later that the Blood Angels would come to understand that they had never been the intended targets. For this was not a force aimed at them, but a weapon of denial seeking the weakest links in their chain of war. Every human – every human but one – in the flotilla was united for a fleeting moment in a single, soul-tearing scream that burned through into their minds and beat them down. It killed many on point of contact, those who were utterly unready for such crushing, black despair. Some would live a little longer before their hearts gave out, some would walk into airlocks or use knives and lasguns upon themselves or others. The screaming went on and on, and none would be unmarked by it. Every heart and mind amongst them was tested to the limit, and many would break under the strain. The strongest would survive, scarred forever, tormented to their graves. The weakest became unhinged, seeing horrors wherever they turned, their minds fracturing like brittle glass. The opening shot had been fired.

Daemon Lord Revealed
As the ships' klaxons blared out their warnings, Sanguinius and his Space Marines took control of the situation. They quickly erected psychic baffles and restrained deranged crew-men. Unbowed, Sanguinius and his senior officers planned their counterattack. Despite the fact that they had never before fought against such a foe, the Blood Angels were sure that they would prevail. But the Blood Angels fury was soon cooled when the dark power behind the strange occurrences finally saw fit to reveal itself. A handful of Servitorsinthechamber where the Blood Angels were assembled, stumbled as one from their alcoves and joined in a keening chorus, puking blood and processor fluids onto the mosaic floor. The automatons died, each falling apart like deconstructed puzzles made of meat and brass. The Primarch drew his deadly blade and called out for the malevolent presence to reveal itself if it dared. The remains of the servitors writhed and and conjoined, the parts assembled a new body. The torso appeared as an androgynous mutation with four arms and quivering, muscular flesh; a head grew into something like that of a great goat, with horns and a sharp, snorting muzzle. The newborn creature flexed and stood tall, looking down on the Blood Angels. It traced claw-fingers over its form, toying with the bloody meat it was made from, and emitted a wet, orgiastic gasp. The vile creature revealed itself as Kyriss the Perverse, a Greater Daemon of the Master of Pleasure, Slaanesh. He declared his domain of the Signus Cluster in the name of his dark god and challenging the Primarch to retake it back from him. As the last word faded, the broken pieces of metal and meat came apart into an ugly pile, the animating power of the monstrous proxy abruptly withdrawn. Enraged, the Primarch ordered his fleet to make for the surface of the planet below. They had walked the road the enemy had laid out for them long enough. Sanguinius would not suffer this vile creature to live.

Fallen Tear
The second phase of the enemy's attack began. Concealed in the shoal of wreckage that girdled Signus Prime, deformed mutant vessels broke free of the planet's gravity and surged forwards to assault the Blood Angels fleet. At first dormant, dead to all sensors, they now came alive with ghostly energy. The monstrous hell-ships attacked the Blood Angels fleet, and soon a full scale orbital battle commenced. The Blood Angels ships fired torpedo barrages and pulsing blasts from their mega-lasers, stripping all protection from the attackers, but still the enemy came on. The Red Tear opened her gun ports and let her cannons give their all, the brilliant spears of particle beams and the streamers of missile salvoes striking hard across the line of the hell-ship advance. The flagship sent repeated requests to the Word Bearers vessel that accompanied their fleet, but their calls for aid went unanswered. As one of the hell-ships approached the Red Tear on a direct collision course, the Word Bearers ship was the only one in position to fend off the assault. In a moment of the basest treachery, the Word Bearers ignited their engines and abandoned the Blood Angels. The hell-ship collided with the flagship and disgorged hundreds of warp-spawned creatures and Chaos corrupted Signusi crew-men. As the servants of Chaos swarmed out into the Red Tear the Blood Angels were there to greet them, but not in great number. Fortunately, the defenders were able to blast apart a small section of bulkhead with a Missile Launcher, the explosive decompression blowing the fleshy monstrosities out into the void.

Meanwhile, on the command deck of the Red Tear, the ship's commander Admiral DuCade was confronted by a demented ship's officer. The Admiral drew her Laspistol and put the maddened officer down. When the Admiral looked around, she could see that the bridge crew surrounding her all had the same tell-tale signs of the same marked madness that the deranged officer had. She pulled her other laspistol and opened fired with both weapons at once. The Admiral blasted them as they ran, killing her entire bridge crew. When the Admiral caught sight of her own reflection in the navi-monitor, she realised that the infection was in her too. Weeping with bitter tears, the Admiral sought to make amends, and so, she set a new course for the massive vessel towards the surface of Signus Prime. With her guns, she destroyed the command console so that her deed could not be undone. She then placed the laspistol against her chest and fired point-blank into her heart. There was no stopping the Red Tear from crashing to the surface of the planet.

With nothing to stop its fall, the Red Tear plunged into Signus Prime’s gravity well and kissed the outer atmosphere in a flickering cascade of orange fire. The Red Tear was a mighty craft, built for the punishment of a hundred wars, yet the flagship had been forged in vacuum and made for the deeps of interplanetary space. It was not a vessel configured to fly in a planet's atmosphere. Meanwhile, the Blood Angels attempted to cut through the command bridge's central hatchway. A Techmarine manage to bypass its locking mechanism and which granted access to the bridge. The Astartes found a mortally wounded bridge crewmember, who informed them of the Admiral's madness and subsequent sabotage of the ship's navigational controls. The Primarch finally arrived and was informed of their dire circumstances. Unable to delay the inevitable, Sanguinius refused to abandon the falling vessel. He was confident that the ancient and mighty vessel would survive the fall and crash intact on the planet's surface. He ordered all personnel to make for the core of the ship to the most heavily protected compartments. The flagship crashed to the planet's surface, and though broken, fallen, but undefeated, the Red Tear had denied its enemy.

Within hours, the Red Tear was no longer a starship. The battle-barge became a fortress, a vast island of burned red metal in the middle of the dead lands. The warriors of the Legion secured the vessel and assessed the damage. What could be used for war was made priority, and what could not be saved was discarded. The survivors of the human crew were few; many had died in the fires and the impact, but more from the ultimate effect of the psychic malaise that had infiltrated their minds. They simply died of fear, hearts seizing in their chests as they crossed into the dark shadow of this forsaken world.

Battle of Signus Prime
The Blood Angels Legion finally confronted the true enemy that now controlled the Signus System, the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. Upon the Plains of the Damned the ferocious Space Marines confronted the vast, nightmarish horde of Chaos Cultists and packs of monstrous daemons. Sanguinius swore to personally confront and vanquish the perverted Kyris, the Daemon Prince of Slaanesh, who controlled the Signus System, leading his elite companies to besiege the daemons defiled palace that was known as the Cathedral of the Mark. Awash in blood, the Blood Angels valiantly fought the Forces of Chaos, cutting them down in their corrupted thousands. The Plains of the Damned became a charnel house as the Blood Angels forced their way into the very heart of the Daemon Prince's realm. On the battlefield that was Signus Prime, Sanguinius was confronted by the infamous Bloodthirster Ka'bandha, a Greater Daemon of Khorne. The Angel and the Daemon fought a titanic battle amidst the blood and carnage all around them. At the height of this confrontation, as the Primarch prepared to strike a killing blow against the fallen Bloodthirster, Ka'bandha struck a dishonourable blow with its massive barbed whip around the Primarch's legs, smashing the Angel to the ground. The Greater Daemon then summoned forth the malefic powers known as the Ragefire, and cut a huge swathe through the ranks of the Sons of Baal with his great axe, killing 500 Blood Angels in an instant. The psychic backlash of so many of his sons dying so suddenly blasted Sanguinius into unconsciousness.

Red Thirst
Leaderless, the Blood Angels' fury was unfettered. The brutal violence of the Bloodthirster Ka'bandha unleashed something dark within the psyche of the Blood Angels, a thirst for blood that would not be slaked until the taint of Chaos had been wiped away from the planet. The Sons of Sanguinius lost themselves in the riot of killing. Careful, drilled lines of company and Chapter became broken and mixed, and from hour to hour, the IX Legion slowly transformed into something wild. Its Astartes became a red hurricane that tore across Signus Prime leaving nothing in its wake. The Blood Angels fought as they had never fought before, not with cool reason and righteous might as their guides, but with hearts beating for vengeance, a berserker’s blood-thirst on their lips.

Unstoppable, all that stood in their path was obliterated. The foe had gravely miscalculated the will of the Angels. Far from being broken by the vicious, brutal attack upon their beloved Sanguinius, they had been cut loose by it. The bonds that held them in check were slipped, and a darkness previously hidden was fully unleashed. Each of them bayed for the blood of their enemy, but it was a thirst that could not be slaked -- only given respite for a brief interval. The red tide broke upon the walls of the great cathedral with unspeakable violence and the clash of a hundred thousand weapons. Leaderless and out of control, the Blood Angels acted on lethal instinct, converging at the towers of bone with only one impulse powering them forward. Hate drove them into the cohorts of Bloodletters and Succubae defending the approaches to the temple, and they tore the daemonic creatures into shreds. The Sons of Sanguinius were no longer a Space Marine Legion, but a force of nature laying waste to everything that stood in their way.

Cathedral of the Mark
The Cathedral of the Mark was a hellish citadel erected on the blighted landscape, and true to its description there was a sigil of immense size cut into the towers that showed itself to the assembled Blood Angels Legion - a star of eight. To their horror, the Blood Angels realised that the arching, rough-hewn towers of the blood-smeared cathedral were constructed of unnatural materials. With grim understanding they had finally discovered the mystery of the millions dead was now answered. The Cathedral of the Mark had not been constructed from stones and mortar, nor ferrocrete and plasteel. Every metre of its towers, every span and archway was built out of bleached human bone, cemented with fat and gristle. The skeletons of dead Signusi citizens, drawn from every planet and moon in the cluster, from common child to elder noble, gathered here to become the raw material for this atrocity.

Miraculously unaffected by the Red Thirst, Chapter Master Raldoron, Meros and a small strike force of Blood Angels assaulted the Cathedral of the Mark. As the majority of their Legion was gripped in the bloody throes of their genetic curse, Meros and his Battle-Brothers fought through hordes of daemons in order to infiltrate the profane basilica. In the meantime, Raldoron's Adjutant, Brother Mkani Kano, gathered his fellow former Librarians who had been forbidden to use their psychic abilities since the Emperor's Decree Absolute during the Council of Nikaea, in an attempt to use their combined psychic abilities to wake their Primarch from his dark torpor. Using their combined psychic might, the Librarians sacrificed themselves with the exception of Kano, and miraculously awoke their Primarch, bringing him back from the edge of the abyss. The Angel arrived to confront both Kyris and Ka'bandha. The Bloodthirster and the Angel fought once more, but ultimately, Sanguinius prevailed and cast the Greater Daemon back into the Warp. The Blood Angels discovered the source of the rage that infected their entire Legion. The Dark Apostle Erebus had created a fell device, a psychic construct, which contained the half dead body of Captain Tagas (the former captain of the Blood Angels' 111th Company) who had been presumed killed in action on the world of One-Forty-Twenty, the planet called Murder by all the Space Marines who had fought there years earlier. Through the use of the dark sorceries of Chaos, the Word Bearers had created a conduit of undiluted rage that consumed nearly the entirety of the Blood Angels Legion. Driven to uncontrollable rage over their fallen Primarch, the Forces of Chaos hoped that the Blood Angels would lose control of their noble aspect, and willingly give themselves over to the Scarlet Path and the worship of the Blood God Khorne.

The Red Angel
The Daemon Prince Kryris offered Sanguinius a foul deal: if the Primarch would willingly take the place of the half-dead Tagas within the psychic construct and give himself fully to the Ragefire, he would ensure that his sons would never again be affected by the genetic curse of the Red Thirst. The Primarch seriously contemplated the daemon's offer and finally came to the conclusion that this sacrifice was worth it to save his beloved sons. But before the Primarch could enter the construct, Meros made the decision for him, and lept into the suspended crystal construct. Sanguinius threw himself into the air in an effort to save his errant son, but was too late. The Apothecary committed the act without uncertainty, for he knew it was right. The Angel could not fall. When Meros had met the warrior Rafen in the dreamscape of their joint healing blood-sleep, he had said a name, a warning. Only at that moment did Meros fully understand. Sanguinius had to live, in order to meet the Arch-Traitor Horus on equal footing. When the terrible confrontation finally came, the Angel had to be there to face him, brother against brother.

Before Meros stepped into the swirling vortex of undiluted rage, he forcibly and painfully forced his cutter to open a jagged tear through the layers of Ceramite and flesh beneath. Using the Reductor on his gauntlet's Narthecium, he guided the device as it bore through his skin, and removed his own Progenoid Glands. The device sucked the nodules of gene-rich tissue into a reservoir pod, sealed within for preservation. Meros's bequest to his Legion now lay secured. Detaching the medicae module from his armour he tossed it towards his Primarch, who snatched it out of the air, and requested him to take it, so that something of him would live on. The Angel vowed to honour his son's final request. With this final act, Meros stepped into the whirling vortex. Meros transformed, writhing in the grip of an infernal glow as the burning power merged with every atom of his being. The flesh of his face distorted into a hollow mask far beyond the guise of pain. His armour became dark and disfigured, joints steaming, the shell of it trembling as it fought to contain energies never meant to be bound to this reality. In the Warp’s shadow, a pair of ghostly, blood-drenched wings briefly unfold from the wounded Apothecary’s back, anointing the ruined bones beneath with a rain of phantasmal blood; then they were gone as Meros' body was possessed by a daemon of the Blood God. Brother Meros was gone, and in his place was the daemonic Red Angel.

Confronting the daemon-possessed Blood Angel, Sanguinius demanded that the avatar of hate release its hold on his son. The Red Angel flatly refused. When the Primarch inquired if there was any small part of Meros that remained, the Red Angel responded that there was a small trace of the former Apothecary. The Primarch told the vile creature to heed his words; whatever Ruinous Powers it served, whatever irrational choice Horus had made to seek a pact with them, they stood defeated this day upon the cusp of victory. Sanguinius vowed that Meros' sacrifice would not be in vain, and that one day, he would find a way to free him from the daemon that now possessed his mortal shell. The Red Angel then took its leave from the Cathedral of the Mark and disappeared into a Warp Gate that it had conjured.

Aftermath
On Signus Prime, on Holst, and in orbit, in every place where their warriors had set foot, their Primarch had commanded that his sons excise all evidence that the Legion had ever come to this place. Over the days that passed after the final charge on the Cathedral of the Mark, an army of servitors and Wardens had gathered up every battle-brother’s corpse, every broken vehicle, every torn piece of armour or blunted sword. The work was almost complete, but for the spent casings of a few bolt shells lying lost and buried in the sands, but little more. Sanguinius had ordered it so. The Blood Angels would leave nothing behind in this blighted, murdered place. Not their ships, not their relics and not their precious dead.

No one would return. It had already been etched into the Legion’s book of hours, by the Primarch’s own hand. The Blood Angels would not build a monument or grave marker here, as they had on other planets where such bloodshed had occurred. The hundreds upon hundreds of the dead would be taken home to Baal to be buried on the slopes of Mount Seraph, the injured ships to stardocks for repair and re-armament. Warning buoys and automated beacons were being deployed all about the star system’s perimeter, there to turn back any ships that might come this way in the years ahead. The Signus Cluster had been declared Mortae Perpetua; forever dead. It would be left lifeless and rotting until its suns burned cold, with nothing but the echoes of those who perished there to bear witness.

A brooding shadow lay across the entire Legion. In the aftermath of the bloodbath at the cathedral, when the witchery of the ragefire had finally been broken, the character of the Blood Angels had turned to morose mien and the bitter sting of misery. The Legion had been wounded in this place, a cut that had pressed to their very core. Like their Primarch, the Blood Angels had been blindsided by those they called kin. The distant perfidy of Warmaster Horus and the closer lies of the Word Bearers had brought them to the brink of the abyss. They had been shown the worst of themselves, and it was a sobering truth to behold. Time would tell if they would heal this wound, or if it would fester within them for eternity. Their genetic curse had been revealed to his sons. Sanguinius had hoped it would never be so, and in his hubris, he tried to hide the truth, and Horus had used that against him. So many trusts had been broken, but now every Blood Angel knew the burn of the Red Thirst, the shadow on their spirit, and the worst of it was, a greater darkness lay beneath that impulse. The Angel vowed that he would do everything in his power to hold that future at bay.

As for the daemonic entity known as the Red Angel, he later presented itself to Warmaster Horus aboard his flagship, the Battle-Barge Vengeful Spirit. He revealed himself as the Fallen Son of Baal, the Cruor Angelus, the Willing Slave. He was the Red Angel, a weapon to be used at Horus and the Traitor Legions' disposal. A weapon to be used to seize Terra and throw down the False Emperor.