Planetary Analysis: Baal

Privation and physical torment are constant and peripheral factors influencing the Blood Angel, and every one of their Astartes. This is reflected also in their dwelling, a name intentionally named after a demonic entity in Biblical theology, and intended as ironic and part of their defiant mythos. These are creatures, vampiric, mentally unstable warriors desperately clinging to the aesthetic of nobility and the intention of nobility. They are equivalent to the alcoholic carrying their years of chips, the addiction accepted within them but the act of falling being presently and consciously denied.

Baal is the theatre for one of the more beloved and cheered battles within the setting as it is directly defended by its denizens, and those of ‘The Blood’ even ten thousand years after the First Founding greatly diminishing the total number of forces that may occupy one world and bear a single unified heraldry. In the defence of a spiral home, in the spirit of a kind of neo-crusade, Knights of Blood, Flesh Tearers, Angels Encarmine and more come together with the Blood Angels, about this planet that is to them their Rome, their Byzantium, which must not fall to the overwhelming might of Hive Fleet Leviathan. The thirst-water, a horrific malignant environmental feature where a kind of virulent quicksand is adapted into a moat. The beautiful angelic statuary lasting ten millennia is cracked, and almost entirely succumbs to the ravages of eternal war wanting to finish what entropy starts.

Blood Angels are creatures modelled after a mythological parasite, ironically acting as something of an antibody for the parasitic Imperium of Man, constantly burning and wasteful of resources as its decaying empire crumbles under the perpetuating weight of administrative demand, psychopathy, and oppression both within and without as numerous enemies constantly attack what the Blood Angels defend, while trying not to accidentally or covertly consume the literal lifeblood of what Astartes literally call “mortals” in typical Anne Rice fashion. There is no escaping terror, horror, and wastefulness in the Warhammer 40,000 world. At best there is forestalling the inevitable, civilians who can escape, a righteous last stand, and warrior pride. 

Those under the desert sun live their lives, with some seeking to become warrior angels that stride the stars. And those who do love their home, the result of so much oppression tied with faith and steadfastness only instilling a persistent love of humanity and of life, which causes each to value Baal as a jewel, in the same way the Great Angel Sanguinius placed a ruby representing Baal on the heart of his armour.