Home › Great Battles › The Devastation of Baal
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For ten thousand years, the Blood Angels and their successors had watched over the Baal System, the desert homeworld and its two moons, Baal Prime and Baal Secundus, from which the Legion of Sanguinius had always drawn its recruits. In the last years of the 41st Millennium, that heritage faced extinction. Hive Fleet Leviathan, the largest Tyranid incursion ever recorded, came out of the galactic void and turned directly towards the heart of the Blood Angels' realm.
The Imperium was already collapsing around them. Abaddon's Thirteenth Black Crusade had broken Cadia. The Great Rift, the Cicatrix Maledictum, was about to tear the galaxy in half. Commander Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels and the oldest living Space Marine, understood that no help would come from Terra in time. If Baal was to survive, the sons of Sanguinius would have to save it themselves.
Dante issued a call that had not been heard in millennia. Every Chapter of the Blood Angels' bloodline — the Flesh Tearers, the Angels Encarmine, the Angels Vermillion, the Blood Drinkers, the Knights of Baal and many more — was summoned to the homeworld. The gathering would become the greatest assembly of Sanguinius's sons since the Horus Heresy, and Dante knew full well that he might be summoning them all to their graves.
They came from across the galaxy. Some Chapters arrived at full strength with their fleets and relics; others sent only a handful of companies, all they could spare from their own wars. Ancient rivalries were set aside. Chapters that had not spoken to one another for centuries stood shoulder to shoulder on the walls. For many of the warriors who answered Dante's call, it was the first time they had ever set foot on the world that had given their gene-sire his name — and many understood that it might be the last thing they ever did.
The Forces
At the heart of the defence stood the Blood Angels themselves, led by Dante, Chief Librarian Mephiston, Chief Chaplain Astorath the Grim, and the Sanguinary Guard. Around them gathered thousands of warriors from the successor Chapters, among them the Flesh Tearers under Gabriel Seth, a brutal commander whose Chapter teetered closer to the Black Rage than any other. With the Astartes came Imperial Guard regiments, Titans, warships and Baal's own defence forces.
Against them came Leviathan — not one hive fleet, but a numberless swarm of bio-ships stretching across the sky. Every hive ship carried millions of warrior-organisms: Termagants, Hormagaunts, Carnifexes, Tyranid Warriors and Hive Tyrants, all directed by the overwhelming will of the Hive Mind. At their head stood the Swarmlord, the most dangerous synaptic creature the Tyranids had ever produced, a strategic genius bred for one purpose: to devour worlds.
The Blood Angels had always fought with a terrible grace, and on Baal they fought with everything they had. Yet even they had never faced a single enemy on this scale. Leviathan's tendrils had consumed whole sectors on their way to the system; the swarm that descended on Baal had already grown fat on the biomass of a hundred worlds.
Phases of the Devastation
The first blows fell in the Cryptus System, a shield of worlds that stood between the hive fleet and Baal. There, Mephiston and the Blood Angels fought to slow Leviathan's advance, but the tide could not be stopped. Cryptus fell, and the swarm moved on towards Baal itself. Dante had used every day bought there to prepare the homeworld's defences.
When the hive fleet reached Baal, the sky turned black. Bio-ships filled the void so densely that the sun disappeared. Spore-mines rained down; mycetic pods by the hundred thousand slammed into the deserts and the shrines. The Tyranid fleet surrounded all three bodies of the system — Baal, Baal Prime and Baal Secundus — and began to devour them. Baal Prime was stripped of its biomass within weeks. The deserts of Baal Secundus, where the Blood Angels had found their recruits since the days of the Great Crusade, became killing fields.
Gabriel Seth and the Flesh Tearers took on the defence of Baal Secundus, fighting with such savagery that even their allies were disturbed. On Baal itself, the defenders were pushed back again and again. At the Dome of Angels, three successor Chapter Masters died holding the line against the swarm. Dante ordered the release of the Death Company — warriors lost to the Black Rage who would fight until they were destroyed — and the sons of Sanguinius threw themselves at the enemy in frenzied, suicidal charges.
The Tyranids did not tire. For every creature killed, ten more poured out of the sky. Fortress after fortress fell. Monasteries that had stood for ten millennia were overrun. By the end, the Blood Angels were defending the Arx Angelicum, the Chapter's fortress-monastery on Baal, with what remained of their strength.
The killing was beyond anything the defenders had imagined. Gaunts came in carpets thousands deep, flowing over the dunes like a living tide. Carnifexes battered down gates that had resisted sieges for millennia. Bio-acid ate through ceramite, and warriors who fell wounded were dragged away and torn apart before their brothers could reach them. In the trenches, the Death Company fought in black armour, howling the names of long-dead brothers, until they were buried under the corpses of the creatures they had killed. Whole companies of successor Chapters died to the last man, and their Chapters died with them.
Above the fighting, the shadow of the Hive Mind pressed down on every psyker in the system. Librarians bled from their eyes and noses as they struggled against the overwhelming psychic presence of the swarm. Astropaths died at their posts. Communication across the system broke down, and the defenders of each fortress fought in isolation, never knowing whether their brothers elsewhere still lived. Mephiston and the Librarius strained to hold back that crushing weight, buying the defenders what clarity they could. It was in this darkness — physical and psychic — that the last act of the Devastation began.
Aftermath
The birth of the Cicatrix Maledictum unleashed a warp storm of unimaginable violence. The tempest tore through the Baal System, and the Tyranid fleet — vast, entangled with the planets — was ripped apart. Bio-ships were crushed, swept into the warp or torn to pieces. The sky over Baal cleared for the first time in months. And through the parting storm came the Indomitus fleet of Roboute Guilliman, the resurrected Primarch, bringing the first of the Primaris Space Marines.
Dante survived. Guilliman named him Lord Regent of the Imperium Nihilus, the dark half of the galaxy cut off by the Great Rift. The Blood Angels' successor Chapters were reinforced with Primaris warriors, and the bloodline of Sanguinius began to rebuild.
But Baal was a ruin. Baal Prime and Baal Secundus had been devoured; the deserts that had produced the Blood Angels' recruits for ten thousand years were scoured of life. Countless sons of Sanguinius were dead, among them many Chapter Masters and veterans. The Devastation of Baal saved the Blood Angels from extinction, but it remains the darkest hour in their history since the death of their Primarch.
For the sons of Sanguinius, the Devastation became both a scar and a rebirth. The new Primaris warriors brought by Guilliman would swell the ranks of a bloodline that had been on the brink of extinction. Yet the old warriors who had fought at Baal would never forget the moment the sky went black and the Hive Mind's voice filled their dreams, or the sight of their Commander, poisoned and bleeding, standing over the headless body of the Swarmlord.
