Astorath the Grim

Astorath the Grim holds an office found in no other Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, that of the Redeemer of the Lost, High Chaplain of the Blood Angels and executioner of the cursed. His grim duty is to grant the Emperor's Peace to every warrior descended from Sanguinius who has fallen at last to the Black Rage, and so his travels carry him not only through his own Chapter but across all the successor Chapters that share the primarch's blighted blood.

He possesses an uncanny gift for sensing the onset of the curse, perceiving its shadow gathering in a battle-brother's soul before any outward sign betrays it. Drawn by that sense to distant and forlorn battlefields, he gathers the afflicted into the Death Company, marshalling the black-clad madmen and leading them in one final charge so that lives soon to be lost may at least be spent with meaning against the enemies of Mankind.

When the killing frenzy is done and the lost have served their last purpose, it falls to Astorath to end them cleanly. His signature weapon is the Executioner's Axe, a great two-handed power weapon forged for this single terrible task, an instrument of mercy that delivers a swift and certain death to warriors who deserved a better fate than the madness that claimed them. In this he is at once headsman and shepherd, the last companion of the doomed.

A sombre, winged figure who descends upon the battlefields of grief like a dark angel, Astorath embodies the fatalism at the heart of the Blood Angels' legend. His work is thankless and unending, for the curse can never be cured, only met and answered, yet he bears it without complaint, for someone must walk beside the lost to their end, and there is no one in all the Imperium better suited to the burden than the Redeemer of the Lost, who walks that road so that his brothers need not walk it alone.