Angels Penitent

Angels Penitent
Battle Cry	"We burn so others may live" (pre-reformation), "We rise on burning wings" (post-reformation), "The Emperor Condemns!" (since the Undying Martyr)
Founding	9th Founding
Successors of	Blood Angels
Original Name	Angels Resplendent
Successor Chapters	None
Chapter Master	Varzival Czervantes (missing, presumed dead)
Primarch	Sanguinius
Homeworld	Malpertuis
Strength	Unknown
Specialty	Being self-flagellating killjoys, punishing sinners.
Allegiance	Imperium
Colours	Orange & black (pre-reformation), blue & gold (post-reformation), black with umber streaks (since the Chapter's adoption of the Testament of Thorns).

"The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maiden-like, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the Nth and meek to the Nth..."

– C.S. Lewis

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

– Chuck Palahniuk

The Angels Penitent are a successor chapter of the Blood Angels, from the 9th Founding. They are an integral part of The Dark Coil, and have a slight Spanish/French theme, based on the fact that they formerly renamed themselves after famous creatives from Old Earth history (Caravaggio, Cervantes, Vonnegut, Borges, Zann, etc.) (Caravaggio is Italian, but the OP is Usians, and they confund Italians with Spanish…), calling their chapter serfs "villeins" (in the sense of a lowly worker) and their individual company residences as "chateaus".

They were once known as the Angels Resplendent, and were some of the prettiest, noblest, and all-around greatest of the sons of Sanguinius. They wore orange armor trimmed with red and silver, and they were notable for being one of two Blood Angels successor chapters who didn't have any issues with their Marines suddenly developing a craving for the red stuff or going bugshit berserk. Things were pretty good for the chapter for a while, though at some point their original homeworld suffered some kind of unspecified catastrophe that forced them to relocate to their current home of Malpertuis, a remote planet located on the eastern fringes of the Imperium. (Incidentally, this world appears to be named after a 1971 horror movie starring Orson Welles.) They also had a curiously short lifespan for Astartes; in Reverie, one of their Apothecaries noted that it was rare for a Resplendent to see their second century, though whether this was because of their innate aggressiveness or some other cause is unknown.

"We Burn So Others May Live!"

Alas, whilst the Resplendent were pretty nice guys in general and had the Black Rage / Red Thirst pretty much locked down, it turned out that they were still susceptible and occasionally one of their brothers would go off the chain, with far more gribbly results than a usual Blood Angels blood blowout.

One day, in a town called Vindarnas near their fortress-monastery, one of the escaped brothers butchered the entire town and caused a rift in the immaterium that would spill over the woods and contaminate the entire region. The fallen champion's rampage in the town left but a single survivor: a young psyker who would be found by Chief Librarian Xoren Castaneda and inducted into the chapter. Together, they would lead the Angels Resplendent towards a new rebirth... a reformation.

"We Rise On Burning Wings!"

The pre-reformation color scheme. There is no artwork for their faux-blue scheme

Castaneda and his disciple pushed the entire chapter to embrace Sanguinius's idea that his sons ought to be just as good at art as they were at war. Many traditionalists resisted, but when the Chapter Master of the Resplendent succumbed to the Black Rage, most of the chapter finally sided with Castaneda and the reformation truly began. It started with the repudiation of the Codex Astartes, and was followed by Castaneda's elevation to the first Chapter 'Magister'. (Hmm... this sounds familiar, I wonder if it could bring devastating consequences to the chapter) Finally, the chapter changed its colors and heraldry too. In order to mark its spiritual rebirth, the Resplendent eschewed the orange colours of old and replaced them with the blue of the Librarium. Or rather, a prismatic blue with shifting hues that was totally not a sign of deviance.

The traditions and creed of the chapter were remade from the ground up. Where other chapters excelled in close combat, fast attack, long-range firepower, or armored assault, the Resplendent made themselves into warrior-artisans, believing that by creating art, they would become better warriors and defenders of mankind. The chapter also started collecting artists of all stripes--poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, authors--to record their deeds and create art for them. Their Fortress-Monastery was soon filled with magnificent paintings, tapestries, installations, and statuary created by the chapter's warriors and their artist collectives. The battle-brothers decorated their pauldrons with beautifully painted individual heraldry, meant to represent their soul. They also discarded the Codex Astartes and created their own organization based on a new book: the Arc Resplendent. Companies were renamed "Rhapsodies", each one specializing in a different form of war, and a variety of new titles were created for the chapter's officers and specialists. As previously mentioned, the Chapter Master became the Chapter Magister, while the company captains became known as Knights Exemplar, sergeants were renamed Arc and Apex Sergeants, the Chaplains collectively became the Black Elegy, and Librarians and Techmarines were renamed Architects and Artificers. Each Rhapsody had a different color, name, and emblem, as well as a different task. The Rhapsody Celestial was the First Company, made up of the chapter's veterans, while the Rhapsody Vigilant was tasked with watching over their fortress-monastery of Kanvolis, and the Rhapsody Concordant was made up of the most level-headed Astartes in the chapter. There were three Questing Rhapsodies--the Empyrean, Astral, and Eternal--who wandered the galaxy like knights-errant while collecting rare artifacts and esoteric knowledge and recruiting aspirants for the chapter, and three Crusading Rhapsodies--the Fulminant, Refulgent, and Conflagrant--who fulfilled the chapter's martial obligations to the Imperium.

In order to gauge their merit and creativity, the Librarius decreed that the final trial for Resplendent Aspirants would be to enter the snowy forest surrounding their Fortress-Monastery of Kanvolis, known as "The Reverie". You know, the one tainted with Chaos shit. Exactly what they had to do in there varied according to the aspirant; the woods were steeped in the warp, so an aspirant could be gone for a few days or a few decades or not return at all, with no time passing on the outside. (Similar to "The Coil" in Phaedra) What each one experienced varied wildly. Gradually, the Resplendent noticed that the effects of the Reverie were slowly getting worse. The chapter's Librarians attempted to seal the rift in the woods but accidentally ended up making the problem worse, along with compounding it by not telling the rest of the chapter. In order to protect the woods and any future aspirants, a cadre of their Librarians were tasked with watching over the woods. Occasionally, gribbly things would escape the Reverie, causing big problems for the Resplendent.

All this made Tzeentch take an autistic interest in the chapter, since they were a successor of the Ninth Legion, born during the Ninth Founding on a poisoned world ninth from its star, which was also ninth by nature. He had begun quietly weaving a web of trickery and deception around the Resplendent, slowly corrupting some of its members from within. The Resplendent themselves allowed decadence and corruption to seep into their fortress-monastery by not paying attention to what their serfs and artists were up to; they even supplied the artists with hallucinogens and other drugs to stimulate their creativity. Unsurprisingly, their laxity allowed cults dedicated to Tzeentch and Slaanesh to spring up among the chapter's mortal servants. This eventually led to a takeover attempt by Tzeentchian forces, led by several unwittingly corrupted serfs and even a few corrupted Astartes. The chapter successfully purged the corruption and drove it back into the Reverie, but they were left more uncertain than ever about their position in the galaxy. Some of them wondered if their obsession with artistry would ultimately lead to their downfall.

At some point, a detachment of the Resplendent, led by then-Captain Varzival Czervantes, took part in a crusade launched by a charismatic preacher named Father Deliverance to bring the worlds of the Providence System into the Imperium. The crusade quickly collapsed into a quagmire when the inhabitants of Providence rejected the word of the God-Emperor and the Imperial forces responded by scourging and purging. The Angels, who'd advocated for a diplomatic approach, got fed up and bailed out almost immediately.

Some of them eventually wound up on Vytarn, a remote Shrine World inhabited by a reclusive Adepta Sororitas Order Minoris known as the Last Candle. Unfortunately, the Last Candle's entire shrine complex had been built over what was essentially a sewer drain for the Webway, and as a result Chaotic corruption had slowly seeped into the place to the point where an entire spire had been lost and some of the Sisters were going squirrelly and doing things that strongly resembled Chaos worship. When all hell finally broke loose and the place started being torn apart by daemons of Tzeentch and Nurgle, the Angels fortified one spire of the Ring and held it against all comers, sheltering anyone who managed to escape the chaos and reach them. Among the refugees was a young psyker named Athanazius Calvino, who would one day become the chapter's greatest Chief Librarian.

"The Emperor Condemns!"

Doomer mode activated.

Some time after the Last Candle incident, Czervantes was promoted to Chapter Master and set out on campaign with the entire 1st Company. While they were gone, a mysterious man with a huge scar across his stomach and glowing eyes showed up at the Angels' fortress-monastery, somehow crossing the impassable river that surrounded it, and sat down for a friendly chat with one of their Chaplains. For nineteen days. At the end of this marathon discussion, the Chaplain in question, one Icharos Malvoisin (which translates to "evil neighbor" in French in case you couldn't see where this was going), emerged and proclaimed the stranger to be the Undying Martyr, a prophet of the God-Emperor, who bore terrible new insights into the Imperial Creed. These truths were dark indeed, for the Martyr had revealed that humanity was corrupt beyond any hope of redemption and that its greatest guardians, the Adeptus Astartes, were the basest of all sinners, for they had faltered and fragmented in the war against the arch-betrayer Horus. There could be no hope of ascension into the Emperor's light, only penitence and pain for humanity's collective sins past and future. The war was already lost and the only course was to fight on in the knowledge of certain defeat.

With that, Malvoisin and the Undying Martyr instigated a purge of the chapter. They tore down and destroyed all the art the chapter had ever made, and left the wreckage to rot in the corridors as a monument to treacherous pride. Then they confronted Athanazius and the rest of the chapter's Librarius, who were the only Angels Resplendent to reject the Martyr's bitter, nihilistic creed. The Librarians greeted their overzealous brothers unarmed and unarmoured, and Athanazius nearly managed to defuse the whole thing by standing forth and speaking the chapter's battle cry --"We rise on burning wings"-- only for Malvoisin to shout "The Emperor Condemns!", at which point the chapter descended upon the Librarians and murdered them.

In the aftermath, the chapter renamed itself to the Angels Penitent and changed their colour scheme and heraldry again, this time from the blue of the Librarians to the black of the Chaplains. Malvoisin declared Czervantes and the 1st Company to be either lost or heretics, as nothing had been heard from them since the Great Purge, and he and the other Chaplains took control of the chapter, forming the Council of Thorns to enforce their new decrees. Creating any kind of art was banned under pain of death, and the Chaplains encouraged their brothers to snitch on each other for any violation of the new rules. Many of the chapter's Astartes took to committing acts of self-mutilation and extreme denial as penance for their "sins". Sadly, this caused the Black Rage to once again manifest in their ranks with a vengeance, and within a short time over half the chapter had been inducted into the Death Company. Even the Scouts were beginning to fall to the Rage, meaning that the chapter was now threatened with extinction.

As a result of all this, a few holdouts became convinced that the Martyr was an agent of Chaos who had bewitched the Chaplains, and hoped that Czervantes would one day come to reclaim the chapter and drive out Malvoisin and those who adhered to his new dictates. As of now, this has yet to happen, and the Angels Penitent have continued on their merry way as a band of bitter, overzealous assholes who live only to punish everyone in the galaxy for being filthy sinners. At least in theory; most of their activities early on were concerned with wiping out all traces of their past, even to the extent of allowing planets to fall to both Tau and Chaos.

Despite the chapter's newfound devotion to hating themselves and everyone else, they answered the call when Dante sent word to the IX Legion's successors that there was going to be a rumble with Hive Fleet Leviathan at Baal and everyone was invited. It is currently unknown whether they were completely wiped out or just sustained massive losses, or if they were rebuilt with Primaris Marines (although some official artwork shows a Primaris Marine wearing their heraldry).

Notable Members

• Varzival Czervantes: Last Chapter Magister of the Angels Resplendent. During his time as captain of the Rhapsody Eternal, he led the purgation of Kanvolis, served in the Providence Crusade, and was present for the fall of the Koronatus Ring on Vytarn, where he encountered a young psyker named Athanazius, who would ultimately be inducted into the chapter and become its Chief Librarian. Disappeared while on crusade with the Rhapsody Celestial of the Resplendent and is currently presumed dead. Named for Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, and possibly the legendary Arthurian knight Percival/Parzival.
• Yukio Caravaggio: Czervantes' predecessor as the leader of the Rhapsody Eternal; he was corrupted and apparently possessed by a painting he bought from a shady merchant in the Calixis Sector and had to be locked away, with Czervantes telling the chapter that he'd died fighting a daemon. His actual status was less certain, with Architect Radiant Satori claiming that the only daemon possessing him was himself, whatever that meant. Probably named for the mercurial Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who was known for his dramatic use of shadows and violent subject matter, and possibly for the equally mercurial Japanese author Yukio Mishima.
• Satori: Architect Radiant and Paladin Illuminant of the Angels Resplendent. He was the sole survivor of the Vindarnas Incident, in which he slew the fallen champion Hanzo Gyguerre, and was recruited by Xoren Castaneda afterward, ascending into the Resplendent's Librarium and ultimately becoming one of the shadowy watchers tasked with overseeing the Reverie and keeping its corruption under control. Unlike the rest of his chapter, his name was not taken from a Terran artist or creative, but instead is a Japanese word which translates roughly as "awakening" or "comprehension", and in Zen Buddhism means that one has experienced or come to understand the true nature of reality, thus achieving enlightenment.
• Athanazius Calvino: Last Chief Librarian of the Angels Resplendent. He was a native of the remote Shrine World Vytarn who had been abducted by a crazy old bat belonging to the local Sororitas order to be surgically mutilated into a representation of one of the order's guiding virtues. He was rescued by another Sister and ultimately met Captain Czervantes, who took him to be inducted into the chapter. He rose to become its Chief Librarian, and was a stalwart warrior and great leader of the Resplendent. He rejected the new creed espoused by the Undying Martyr, only to be murdered by his own battle-brothers. Possibly named for St. Athanasius of the Coptic Church and Italian author Italo Calvino.
• Icharos Malvoisin: Chaplain of the Angels Resplendent and leader of the Council of Thorns in the Angels Penitent. He was the instigator of the chapter's fall from noblebright warrior-poets to self-flagellating doomers. He was led to this new outlook by a strange man known only as the Undying Martyr, who convinced him over the course of nineteen days that humanity in general and the Space Marines in particular were all irredeemable sinners who deserved nothing but death for their failures. He led the Angels in the purgation of their fortress-monastery and formed the Council of Thorns to enforce the new creed. Possibly named for Icarus, the mythical Greek boy who flew too close to the sun, and the sinister Malvoisin brothers from Ivanhoe.
• Ennio Zann: An Artificer Radiant (Techmarine) of the chapter who was corrupted after noticing the daemonic influence seeping out of the Reverie. He created an AI to help him develop a countermeasure, only for it to hijack his brain and turn him into a vector for Chaos shit to invade the Resplendent's fortress-monastery. Peter Fehervari was clearly having fun with this one, as he appears to be named after legendary composer Ennio Morricone and the mad violinist Erich Zann from one of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories.
• Xoren Castaneda: Former Chief Librarian and first Chapter Magister of the Angels Resplendent. Led the chapter's reformation into noblebright warrior-poets after seeing one of his battle-brothers rip up an entire town while in the throes of the Red Thirst and deciding that something needed to be done to fix the problem. Nobody wanted to listen to him until the current chapter master Black Raged and everyone else decided that Castaneda might be onto something. Possibly named for proto-existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and Spanish author Carlos Castaneda.