There’s a line in the Horus Heresy rules that I keep going back to. Blood Angels Inductii squads get a special rule called Revenant Legion, and what it does is stop them making a sweeping advance after they win a combat. The stated reason is that they pause to consume the bodies.
That’s it. That’s the rule. A squad of Space Marines lets a broken enemy escape because it stopped to eat, and the rulebook prints it in the same dry tone it uses for grenade ranges.
Nobody takes it. You give up Spite of the Legion, which is actually useful, in exchange for a bit of Fear on one Despoiler squad, and the maths doesn’t work. Pete looked over my shoulder at that entry once, while I was reading his book because I don’t own it, and asked whether the design team had run out of ideas that week. He’d skipped the flavour text above the profile, which is where the Legion’s original name is sitting.
Black Library announced Raldoron: Revenant on the 15th of July. Guy Haley writing, out on the 24th of September, standard hardback and a special edition. Raldoron, First Captain of the IXth, has to hold together a Legion filling up with Inductii who can’t control the Red Thirst, while Horus takes the Harmon star cluster. GW’s own copy says their brutality “harks back to the brotherhood that existed before the Great Angel calmed his sons’ savage proclivities.”
The Blood Angels Legion had a name before Sanguinius
Every Legion existed before its primarch turned up. That’s the part people forget, or at least the part I forgot for about eight years. The gene-seed was made on Terra, the first recruits were raised on Terra, and the Legions went to war with numbers instead of names while the Emperor hunted for the twenty scattered sons. The IXth picked up a name during that stretch.
They were called the Revenant Legion. Gaunt, pale, unnervingly quiet, and prone to consuming the dead after a battle. It wasn’t a compliment from an admiring ally, it was what other Imperial forces called them because of how they looked and what they did. Then Sanguinius was found on Baal Secundus, and the standard version of events is that his arrival transformed them into the golden host everyone recognises. Nobility, beauty, the whole aesthetic that the Blood Angels have been built on ever since.
I should say plainly that I don’t know how much of the Revenant material is bedrock canon and how much is Forge World filling in a gap. A lot of it lives in rules-book sidebars rather than novels, which is usually a sign that somebody needed a hook for a unit entry and worked backwards. But it’s been consistent for years now, and GW just put the word on a book cover, so somebody upstairs considers it real enough.
Inductii were the Legions’ temp staff
After Isstvan, both sides needed bodies faster than the process allowed. The full making of a Legionary took years: implants staged over a long period, hypno-indoctrination layered in, culture absorbed from veterans who’d been fighting since Terra. None of that survived contact with a civil war. So the Legions compressed it. Multiple implants at once, months instead of decades, conditioning cut down to whatever could be crammed in before deployment. The results were called Inductii, and almost nobody who’d fought in the Great Crusade had any respect for them.
Different Legions handled it differently, which is the fun part of the Forge World material. The Ultramarines kept the gene-seed process intact and changed only the training. The Imperial Fists on Terra delayed the Betcher’s Gland and the Sus-an Membrane because they judged neither one relevant to a siege, and both organs quietly atrophied out of the bloodline afterwards, which is a detail I’ve bored people with at my local store more than once. There’s a whole argument about whether Fists can even hibernate properly now…
The Blood Angels entry is the one that matters here. Most of their Inductii didn’t receive the intensive mental conditioning that curbed the more animalistic aspects of the gene-seed. Some elements of the Legion made them perform flash-indoctrination on the dead. They were issued bolters, phosphex bombs, and bayonets, and the rules-book flavour text says they saw none of the beauty in battle their older brothers talked about, only the horror.
Read that first sentence again, because it changes what the Red Thirst is. If conditioning is what curbs the animalistic side of the gene-seed, then the noble, controlled, beautiful Blood Angels of the Great Crusade were partly a training outcome. Skip the training and you don’t get a defective Blood Angel, you get the Legion as it comes out of the box. Which is presumably why the conditioning was intensive in the first place, and why nobody wrote the reason down anywhere a recruit could read it.
Raldoron spent his whole career on containment
He’s got the CV. First Captain of the Three Hundred, commander of the 1st Company, equerry to Sanguinius, and holder of the then-new honorific “Chapter Master” back when that word meant an advisor rather than a rank. Rogal Dorn called him an exemplar of the martial spirit of the Great Crusade after the Malignax Campaign, and Dorn was not a generous man with compliments. Sources put him in the same conversation as Sigismund, Abaddon and Sevatar for sheer capability.
He also had a running friction with Azkaellon, who ran the Sanguinary Guard and commanded by the book in a way that grated on the 1st Company. Office politics with power armour, basically.
But the thing Raldoron actually did, over and over, was keep the Legion’s secret. On Melchior, fighting the Nephilim alongside the Luna Wolves, he found Brother Alotros gone to the Red Thirst. He reported it to Sanguinius, Sanguinius went to deal with his own son, and Horus came out of that room alongside him knowing everything. Raldoron’s response was to have Apothecary Meros extract and destroy Alotros’s progenoid glands, cutting the flawed line out of the Legion’s future, and to tell him: speak of this to none.
Then Signus. After the fighting, Nassir Amit admitted to Raldoron that it was he who had killed the Space Wolves watch pack. Azkaellon had already told a different story to protect Sanguinius from the shame of it, and Raldoron agreed to back the lie. He made that call for the sake of holding the Legion together, knowingly, and it was probably the right one.
So yeah. Raldoron. Quiet bloke. Doesn’t talk much, reads people well, always at the Angel’s shoulder in a scene where somebody else does the shouting. Destroys the evidence, keeps the secret, backs the story. Been doing it since Melchior and nobody in the Legion knows the half of it. And now the war’s filling his companies with replacements nobody had time to condition properly.
I bought a Forge World Raldoron years ago at Warhammer World, resin, on a trip that was supposed to be about picking up Imperial Fists transfers. I don’t play Blood Angels. I have never played Blood Angels. I bought him because the Encarmine Warblade looked good in the cabinet and I was standing near a till, and he has been in a drawer in his blister ever since, which is longer than my kid has been alive. Pete has painted two entire armies in the time that model has been in that drawer.
What the novel is actually setting up
Haley’s premise puts the containment officer in charge of the leak. Raldoron has spent decades making sure nobody outside a very small circle knows what the IXth carries, and the Heresy hands him replacements who broadcast it. Every squad of Inductii is a version of the argument he’s been quietly losing since Melchior, standing there in Mark V with a bayonet.
Whether the book delivers on that is a different question, and I’d temper expectations a bit. Haley is reliable and he’s written Raldoron before, in The Lost and the Damned, so this isn’t a stranger picking up the character. But single-character Heresy novels can turn into a sequence of battles with the interesting bit as a garnish, and the Harmon star cluster campaign is a blank slate, which means there’s nothing on record forcing the book to be about anything in particular.
The other thing I keep circling is where this lands chronologically. Raldoron survives all of it. He’s at Helios Gate during the Siege of Terra, he’s aboard the Vengeful Spirit at the end, and when Sanguinius dies he’s trapped in the Inevitable City and the Black Rage takes him along with everyone else. He comes out of it with a dozen survivors and no memory he wants to keep. The man who spent two hundred years suppressing the Flaw ends up carrying his primarch’s body to Baal as its first Chapter Master, after the Legions were broken into Chapters. His eventual fate is listed as lost to history, which for a character with his record is a strange thing to leave sitting there.
If Haley wanted to, the Inductii are the setup for that. A Legion argues about whether the savage ones are still brothers, and then twenty-odd years later every survivor becomes one. I have no idea whether the book goes there. It’s coming out in September, and I’ll probably buy it, and it’ll probably go on the shelf next to the twelve Heresy novels GW reprinted out of fifty-four that I also haven’t got round to.
The Revenant Legion rule is still bad, by the way. I checked again while writing this and it’s still bad.
