The Signus Campaign

Among the deadliest snares Horus laid during the Age of Darkness was the one meant for the Blood Angels and their primarch Sanguinius. It was not enough for the Warmaster to defeat this noblest of Legions in battle; he sought to corrupt it utterly, to turn the most beautiful of his brothers into a monster or a martyr. The Signus Campaign was that trap sprung: a descent into a daemon-haunted hell designed to break the Blood Angels body and soul, and the crucible in which their darkest curse was first revealed.

The Warmaster's Errand[edit]

Horus, still wearing the mask of the loyal commander, despatched Sanguinius and the Blood Angels to the Signus Cluster, a cluster of worlds said to be under threat from a xenos incursion. It seemed a worthy task for a great Legion, and Sanguinius, who loved his father and had not yet learned the depth of Horus's treason, went willingly, leading his sons far from Terra and the loyalist muster. In truth there was no simple xenos foe. The Signus Cluster had been given over to the servants of Chaos, and every world within it prepared as a stage for the Blood Angels' damnation. By the time the Legion understood where it had been sent, the way home was already closing behind them.

Into the Daemon Cluster[edit]

As the fleet pressed inward, reality itself began to fray. Warp storms clawed at the ships, whispers filled the vox, and the men of the Blood Angels found themselves beset by horrors that no xenos could account for. The worlds of the cluster had been corrupted into daemon-realms, their skies weeping blood and their surfaces crawling with the creatures of the Immaterium. This was the true face of the enemy the Legion had been sent to fight: not aliens but daemons, marshalled by the powers of Chaos and hungry for the souls of Sanguinius's sons. The Blood Angels had sailed into a trap with no walls, a war against the warp itself, and their faith and discipline were tested as never before.

The Curse Awakened[edit]

It was here, amid the daemon-worlds of Signus, that the hidden flaw in the Blood Angels' making first showed itself in full. A terrible thirst rose in them, a maddening hunger for blood and a berserk fury that stripped away their nobility and left only the beast. This was the Red Thirst, and beyond it lurked a deeper doom: a black madness in which a warrior became lost in the death-agony of the Legion's own primarch-to-be. The powers of Chaos had chosen their prey with cruel precision, for the very gene-flaw that made the Blood Angels beautiful also made them vulnerable to the whispers of the Blood God. Some of Sanguinius's finest sons fell to the frenzy, and the Legion teetered on the edge of becoming the very thing the daemons wished them to be.

Sanguinius and Ka'Bandha[edit]

At the heart of the trap waited Ka'Bandha, a mighty Bloodthirster and greater daemon of the Blood God, unleashed to shatter the Blood Angels' spirit. When the two hosts met, the daemon worked a horror upon the Legion: with a single surge of its dread power it drove hundreds of Blood Angels into the killing madness, turning them on themselves and on their own, and slaughtering many more in a heartbeat. The grief and rage of that moment might have broken Sanguinius forever. Instead the primarch rose to meet the daemon in single combat, angel against beast, the most radiant of the Emperor's sons against a monster born of pure slaughter. Their duel was titanic. Sanguinius was struck down and grievously wounded, his body broken, yet in his agony he found not despair but resolve, and rising once more he hurled the Bloodthirster back and cast it howling from the field.

The Temptation Refused[edit]

Ka'Bandha's defeat did not end the trial, for the true object of the campaign was Sanguinius's soul. The powers of Chaos offered the wounded primarch a vision of what might be (dominion, the salvation of his sons, a future in which the Blood Angels need never fear their curse) if only he would kneel and accept the patronage of the Dark Gods. It was the same bargain that had claimed Magnus at the Burning of Prospero, the same temptation that would echo through the whole Horus Heresy. Sanguinius refused. Though he foresaw in that moment his own death and the doom that awaited the loyalists, he would not trade his honour or his sons' souls for any promise of the enemy. At the heart of the corrupted cluster stood a great daemon-prince of the god of excess, who had raised a monstrous cathedral to mark the moment of the Angel's fall; when Sanguinius refused, that shrine and its master were cast down, and the ritual meant to consecrate the Blood Angels to Chaos collapsed into failure. In refusing, he broke the trap's deepest snare, and the daemons that had gathered to feast on his fall were denied their prize.

The Cost and the Meaning[edit]

The Blood Angels fought their way clear of the Signus Cluster at last, but they left much of themselves behind. Thousands of warriors were dead, whole worlds ruined, and the Legion carried out of that hell a wound it would bear forever: the twin curse of the Red Thirst and the black madness, now awakened and never again to be fully stilled. Yet they came out unbroken in spirit, and their primarch's defiance had proved that even in the darkest snare the Emperor's sons could hold to their oaths. The Signus Campaign delayed the Blood Angels' return to the loyalist cause and cost them dearly, exactly as Horus had intended, but it failed in its ultimate purpose, for Sanguinius reached the Age of Darkness's final battlefields with his honour intact. When at last the loyal Legions gathered for the defence of Terra, the Angel would take his place upon the walls, and there fulfil the doom he had glimpsed in the ashes of Signus.