Blood Gorgons
| Blood Gorgons | ||
|---|---|---|
| Gorgon head | ||
| Battle Cry | Unknown | |
| Origin | 21st Founding | |
| Warband Leader | Gammadin | |
| Base of Operations | Cauldron Born (Space Hulk) | |
| Strength | ~900 marines | |
| Specialty | Looting shit, occasional witchery, doing strange things with each other's organs (no, not that, you sick fuck) | |
| Allegiance | Chaos Undivided | |
| Colours | Burnt Umbra | |
The Blood Gorgons are generally considered to be a pretty awesome piratical, renegade chapter of Chaos Space Marines created by Henry Zou for his novel of the same name. In doing so, he also did something that defied the very laws of the universe and Chaos: he made a batch of Chaos Marines that actually have half a shit worth of sense and purpose left in them. Their leader, Gammadin, has a FUCKIN' CRAB CLAW HAND. Suck it, Yarrick.
The Gorgons' patron is a daemon prince of Chaos Undivided(? or something similar...) who actually seems to be a pretty cool guy who doesn't afraid of no big four, relatively speaking that is, for being a manifestation of purest darkness and evil and Chaos and all. He's named after the eldest son of (the historical) Genghis "muhfuggin" Khan. Other daemons do talk their shit about him and take their shots, though. They are daemons, after all.
He is not, of course, to be confused with that a certain swift and inscrutable Oriental, and presumably lying about his name, as daemons are wont to do, especially seeing as he is said to be older than humanity itself. To be fair, it is a pretty badass name though. Yep, YET-YEY-YET-Yetsugei! could work for me if I was a hundred millenia old malevolent preternatural entity who wanted to call myself something when doing sneaky business with some puny mortals.
While most Chaos Space Marines lose it and become fun, psychotic maniacs with no greater goal in life than to constantly bathe in the blood of virgins, the Blood Gorgons were boring, kept their minds, and did silly things like get shit done. They aren't particularly beholden to Chaos in general and particularly not to any one of the Big Four, even seeming to have a bit of a beef with Nurgle and the Death Guard (even before the events of the book where they come into direct conflict, it's stated that they fought before when the Gorgons raided a Death Guard ship. Maybe that started the beef. Why one would want to raid a plague-ridden Nurgley ship is anyone's guess.) They are mentioned as having Slaaneshi sex slaves, though, and being martial badasses Khorne probably digs their style, and in Flesh and Iron they have a heavily Tzeentchian flavour. So really they could be all over the place. What their (loyalist, presumably?) genestock is is anyone's guess. Ultras? Salamanders? Maybe even the White Scars? (fanwanking intensifies)
They are the closest chapter we're likely to get to Chaos Reasonable Marines - they even don't treat their slaves like shit (though they end up killing a few anyway) and they pick their battles carefully, constantly training to stay sharp. They never stuck around too much in one place, never placed their faith too much in one Chaos God (well, one of them did, and it didn't turn out so well), and had a fine old piratical time. They've fought themselves some Eldar, Imperials (an episode is mentioned where they gave the Space Wolves a good licking), and even good old Abby himself at least once, as well as some other traitor warbands/legions (notably the Death Guard), and probably more factions to boot, and all around they seem to give a good account of themselves against anyone who fucks with their shit or has shit that they want--they are raiders, almost exclusively.
As such they don't hold territory per se, nor do they really care about ideology, but do take it very personally when others mess with resources they consider themselves to have exclusive rights to, and are perfectly happy to promote Chaos ideology/theology to recruit guerillas for war against the Imperium. In the latter case, in a manner that would do the Alpha Legion proud, four Blood Gorgons (two "bonds", see below) stealthily supported a Maoist-style insurgency in an allegory for American involvement in Vietn-on an Imperial planet even turning Jane Fo-some Imperials to their side (it didn't help that the Ameri-*BLAM* Fren-*BLAM* Ecclesi-*BLAM* wait, what were we talking about? *BLAM*.)
Okay, then. So anyway, the Gorgons got some with just about everyone (they even kept some big fuckoff 'nids around their Space Hulk for live-fire practice sessions. Which is apparently a thing for them. They would even leave a platoon of Imperial Guard in there with a couple of weeks rations and rudimentary weaponry, let them get lost in the ship so their location would even be a surprise to the Gorgons themselves, wait a week or so, and go hunting.) In the "losses" column, though, at least one squad, to their lasting shame, got their asses handed to them by some hoofed blue Asian people ("withdraw in good order," they said. The rest of the Gorgons wouldn't let them live it down, though eventually redemption came in dramatic form.)
Unfortunately, their spiritual liege, the former Black Library writer Henry Zou, who was declared Excommunicate traitoris for some pretty unambiguous plagiarism in a passage from Flesh and Iron, the book about the insurgency discussed above, so we may never know what actually befell them, or if they're still doing their thing. The sad thing is that it was just one passage and not even a very compelling one, and Zou was a pretty promising writer.
Notable Characteristics and Practices
Created during the Cursed Founding, they either committed some act of heresy, decided they weren't being appreciated enough by the Imperium and promptly left to do their own thing, or, it is occasionally implied in the books (but never stated outright), did nothing wrong, but were declared excommunicate traitoris by the Inquisition nonetheless. Now they are inhabiting a Space Hulk known as the Cauldron Born. The colour scheme of the chapter is a burnt bronze, and they wear war masks that they claim can scare even daemons. They value their chapter's freedom and independence more than anything else and fight fiercely to defend it.
Their unique, perhaps defining, ritual practice, is the Blood Bond, a process where two Blood Gorgons share organs, blood, and other parts of their flesh with each other, literally swapping body parts. This creates a spiritual bond between the two, sharing feelings and sensations. This practice was apparently started after the resolution century-spanning, fratricidal, intra-Chapter war that followed their excommunication from the Imperial forces. It worked pretty well for thousands of years, and then enough stuff happened to write a novel about it. Go read it, it's pretty good. The title is... Blood Gorgons. Go figure.
Not all in the chapter are bonded in such a way. The coven of Chirurgeon-Witches is a hybrid of Apothecaries and Chaos Sorcerers, led by Anko Muhr. They are psykers responsible for preserving the gene-seed of the chapter, creating new space marines, and performing the ritual that binds brothers together. Between their lack of bonding and their studies of the deeper chaos arts which the other Gorgons distrust, there is a rift between them and the rest of the chapter.
Another creepy practice, sort of thematically similar, that they engage in is implanting their slaves with tiny parasites in their cheeks that are kind of like a cross between the chest-popping alien in Alien and the nightmare-fuel earworm from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (no, not the Primarch, the motherfucker, or the daemon; fuck, this is getting confusing.) This parasite swells if the slave is beyond a certain distance from his or her master (female slaves are noted several times; some of them are called something along the lines of "pampered pleasure pets," selected according to "nine Slaaneshi principles of beauty," which probably makes them pretty hot. And/or have dicks. But anyway.) This swelling, within a day or so, leads to, well, it's grimdark. When the Gorgons deploy off-ship, they extract the parasites, to be replaced again on their return. If they don't return due to death in battle, then the slaves are all slain. Grimdark. (But not without parallels in historical human cultures, either.)
In their eponymous book, Gammadin goes missing and they get betrayed by Muhr, who was allied with a Nurglite warband to subjugate and turn the Blood Gorgons to Nurgle. Fortunately, a Blood Gorgon called Barsabbas manages to pull off some awesome feats like soloing a group of fifteen Dark Eldar Batman-style to free Gammadin. The passage written from the deldar's perspective when they realize they aren't fucking around with regular old mon-keigh is pretty neat, you can almost imagine the smugness wiping off their knife-eared little faces.
Once Gammadin returns, the Blood Gorgons (stripped of their weapons and held prisoner) manage to force the warband of 550 Plague Marines and 4 companies of Septic Infantry to GTFO the Cauldron Born in only nine days, killing their Terminator Lord and Muhr too. Unfortunately, given this pretty badass foundation, it is unlikely that GW will do much more with the Blood Gorgons in future fluff, since Henry Zou was dropped by Black Library for plagiarism. However, the cover art of the Blood Gorgons novel has been reused for every edition of the Chaos Space Marine codex since 6th, so GW hasn't quite forgotten about them yet.