The final card of the Astartes II teaser reads “Suffer Not The Alien To Live,” and under it, “2026.” That line belongs to the Deathwatch. It’s stamped across their codex and spoken by every marine seconded to the Long Watch. Games Workshop’s own write-up called it “a pretty unsubtle hint at the end as to the nature of the final story,” and GW does not usually hand you that much.
Five marines from five different Chapters, and a xenos-hunting oath on the last card.
The teaser dropped in January 2025 and ran about ninety seconds. GW has been clear that none of it is footage from the actual show. What you’re watching is a montage of the five protagonists’ former lives, before whatever happens to them happens, which makes the Chapter badges in those shots the closest thing we have to a cast list.
Who’s actually in it
Frame-by-frame breakdowns landed within a day, because of course they did. The line-up: a Retributor, the invented Chapter from the original Astartes shorts, wearing a hand-clasping-a-skull icon. A Blood Angel with a jump pack and the winged blood drop. A Sons of Medusa marine riding a green Predator through a mountain pass. A Scythes of the Emperor brother in black and yellow, firing from behind a boarding shield. And a Mortifactor in a bone-white skull helm.
The Blood Angels bring a codex supplement, a plastic range and roughly nine hundred novels to the party. The other three established Chapters are working with paragraphs. No kits, no character models, no supplements. I went and checked the transfer sheet rack at my local store last weekend, mostly out of stubbornness, and the nearest thing on it was a generic Ultramarines successors sheet with blank shoulder decals.
Whoever built this roster went past the front shelf and started opening boxes at the back of the stockroom.
The Scythes have three suits of Terminator armour left
Start with the Scythes of the Emperor, whose position in the 41st Millennium is close to untenable.
They’re an Ultramarines successor, home world Sotha, sitting on the eastern edge of Greater Ultramar. In 992-993.M41 Hive Fleet Kraken came through and ate the place. Not “besieged.” Consumed. The survivors evacuated to the Miral system and made a stand on the death world of Miral Prime, where Imperial Armour Volume 2’s entry on the Defence of Miral Prime records that “all but a handful” of them martyred themselves, and afterwards the Chapter “can mass barely a single company of warriors.” Chapter Master Thorcyra died there. His successor spent the following years running hit-and-run attacks and salvaging whatever hardware could still be salvaged.
The detail that stuck with me is the armour. After Sotha, the Scythes had three suits of Terminator armour in the entire Chapter. Three. Not three squads. They couldn’t field a Codex-legal First Company because the armour didn’t exist any more, and a Chapter that can’t replace Tactical Dreadnought plate isn’t rebuilding, it’s rationing. They also started wearing psychic dampening hoods, because the Hive Mind’s shadow was still on them and the brothers who’d lived through Sotha could feel it.
So yeah. Three suits. In a whole Chapter. I keep going back to that number because it’s such a specific, boring, quartermaster sort of detail, and 40K doesn’t usually do quartermaster details. It does ten thousand years and endless war and skulls on everything. This is somebody in a stores bay with a clipboard going, right, we’ve got three of these left, who’s having them.
And now one of them is in a five-man team whose oath is “suffer not the alien to live.” A Chapter with three Terminator suits, standing next to a Blood Angel. The Tyranids didn’t just hurt the Scythes, they removed the Chapter’s ability to be a normal Chapter, and the Imperium’s answer was apparently to keep sending them out anyway.
They did eventually come back. Cawl’s Ultima Founding pushed Primaris reinforcements into them during the Indomitus Crusade, Guilliman parked them back in Ultramar’s defensive line, and they rebuilt the orbital station Aegida above Sotha as a fortress-monastery while the planet itself is slowly brought back. Whether the marine in the teaser is a pre-Rift survivor or a post-Indomitus recruit is the sort of thing thirty people are already arguing about on Reddit and nobody can settle.
I did try to paint them once. Around 2011, on the back of reading the Black Library Scythes anthology, I bought a squad of Tactical marines with the specific intent of doing black armour with yellow plates. I play Imperial Fists. I have painted more yellow than any sane adult should. I still could not make Iyanden Darksun sit over black primer without it going the colour of an old bruise, and after the fourth model I sprayed the lot bone white and made them something else entirely. Pete still brings it up. He paints Salamanders, which is green over black, and green is forgiving, and he knows it.
The Sons of Medusa are still on probation
The Sons of Medusa carry a different kind of baggage. Theirs is political.
Imperial Armour Volume 10’s Chapter entry lays it out: they came out of the Moirae Schism in the early 35th millennium, during the Nova Terra Interregnum, when a radical Mechanicus creed spread through the priesthood and into Chapters with close Martian ties. The Iron Hands had a lot of those ties. A significant chunk of the Chapter took the Moirae doctrine on board, championed by Iron-Father Setol Sollex, and the Chapter came within touching distance of civil war. The Great Clan Council’s fix was blunt. Exile for the dissenters, plus a binding treaty that neither side would ever raise a hand against the other.
Roughly a third of the Iron Hands walked. A ragtag fleet with no home world and no sanction, still using their old iconography, still commending their gene-seed to Imperial authorities as if nothing had happened, waiting to be recognised. It took until the Age of Redemption for the High Lords to weigh their record and their gene-seed, find both clean, and ratify them as a Chapter by what Imperial Armour calls “an almost unique edict.” The Adeptus Mechanicus objected. So did a fair number of other Chapters. Their motto is “Purge the Weak,” which is not the motto of an organisation that has relaxed about anything.
They’re fleet-based, organised into three war clans instead of ten, and they run an unusual amount of armour, which is why the teaser shows one on a tank. The Badab War is where most of their recorded battle honours come from, fighting on the loyalist side, largely to demonstrate that they were the loyalist side.
The Mortifactors eat their kills
Mortifactors are the other Ultramarines successor in the mix, which is funny in a bleak way, because nothing about them reads as Ultramarian.
Their home world is Posul, and Posul is dark. The Chapter recruits from feral hunter populations, and the White Dwarf #468 short story by Christopher Forrester about a Mortifactors strike force cut off by the Great Rift makes the culture explicit through its viewpoint character, an Apothecary called Devan Arathos. His strongest memory of home is “blood tracing his chin, fat stringing his teeth and marrow sucked from bones.” The Chapter’s scouts wear the skulls of things they’ve killed. When one of them takes a kill, a portion gets offered to the senior brother present, the way a hunter gifts the first bite to their chieftain. The story frames all of it as ordinary Chapter practice, performed by loyal Astartes doing their duty.
Their whole spiritual structure runs through the Reclusiam. Chaplains hold more authority among the Mortifactors than they do in most Chapters, ancestor veneration is central to Chapter doctrine, and funerary rites take up an amount of time that any other Chapter would spend drilling.
So the roster includes a warrior whose Chapter ritually consumes the fallen, standing next to a warrior whose Chapter watched its home world get consumed. I have no idea whether Syama Pedersen picked those two on purpose or whether it’s a coincidence that only looks deliberate once you’ve read the source books.
Although. Maybe I’m reading the tea leaves too hard here. “Suffer not the alien to live” turns up on Imperial banners, sermons and bolter casings across the setting, and the Deathwatch don’t own the phrase outright. It’s possible the card is just a mission statement about the enemy this season, and the five Chapters were picked because Syama liked how the colour schemes looked next to each other. I keep landing back on the Deathwatch reading, though, because a five-man squad drawn from five Chapters is not a thing that happens in 40K for any other reason. That structure is the Deathwatch’s entire organisational premise, and it has been since 2003.
The Retributors were never supposed to be canon
The fifth marine is the one Syama Pedersen made up.
He explained the reasoning in a Grimdark Magazine interview years before any of this was official. “Nothing against the big boys but I wanted something of a clean-slate that would let me portray my personal take on what a ‘Space Marine’ is.” The Retributors, he said, were built as a Chapter interested in operating in small numbers against elite targets rather than massed battle glory. And then this, which I think about a lot: “It’s also a pet peeve of mine when the same old established factions show up in every story, I think it makes the universe feel like a smaller and less epic place.”
He made those five shorts alone, over three years, and put them on YouTube. GW brought him in-house in 2021. The originals now sit on Warhammer TV, which is the informal test for canon these days, and that means a Chapter one bloke invented in his spare time is officially part of the Imperium’s order of battle. So are the cultists they fought, and that chained metallic sphere at the end of episode five that nobody has explained…
Look at what he did with an actual GW budget and access to the whole archive. He didn’t reach for Ultramarines. He went and found three Chapters that mostly exist as paragraphs in a Forge World book and a White Dwarf short story, and put them next to his own invention. That’s the same instinct that produced the Retributors in the first place, just aimed at the back catalogue instead of a blank page. It’s what makes the Imperium feel like a million worlds rather than five recognisable ones, which is roughly the argument the Dark Krakens exist to make too.
The original Astartes shorts came out in 2018, which is about as long ago as my kid learning to walk, and it still gets recommended to newcomers as the best entry point in the setting. Thirteen minutes, no dialogue.
On timing, I genuinely don’t know what to tell you. Spikey Bits updated their guide this month saying GW has confirmed December 2026 on Warhammer+. Wargamer’s tracker still says the only date GW has ever given is the year, and the WarCom article from June says “2026” with no month attached. I can’t find the December confirmation anywhere official, so treat it as a strong rumour rather than a date to book time off for.
