THE UNFORGIVEN
Amid the ashes of the Horus Heresy, distrust and accusation thickened the air. Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines, initiated the Second Founding and, across the galaxy, the Space Marine Legions fragmented into the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. Each of the original Legions spawned a First Founding Chapter that retained its name and identity, along with Successor Chapters responsible for becoming their own, entirely autonomous entities. The Dark Angels could hardly resist the motion, for the cataclysmic destruction of Caliban was fresh in their minds, and they could not risk drawing any undue attention to themselves. Thus they created several Successor Chapters, and so it appeared that they followed Guilliman's dictates to the letter.
As with their every deed since the fall of Caliban, however, the Dark Angels were following a hidden agenda. Their successors, who would collectively become known as the Unforgiven, formed their own Inner Circles to guard the knowledge of the Dark Angel's secret shame. Each Chapter established specialised companies to aid in this endeavour, based upon the Dark Angels' own Deathwing and Ravenwing, though named differently to maintain at least the veneer of individuality. Finally, though the Unforgiven claimed their own Chapter homeworlds, heraldry and doctrines, their leaders attended clandestine meetings on the Rock with the Supreme Grand Master of the Dark Angels. These ritual-laden gatherings saw the Unforgiven take their orders from the master of the Dark Angels, so that the ongoing hunt for the Fallen could continue in utmost secrecy. The Lion's sons could not risk these meetings becoming common knowledge. Yet rumours persist of nepotism and legion building. And over time, these rumours have led to the Unforgiven being regarded with distrust.
Despite their impeccably pure gene-seed, the Dark Angels have been passed over for many of the Foundings that have created fresh Chapters to fight the Imperium's wars. Yet, from time to time, the Adeptus Terra have been forced to permit the Dark Angels another Founding, the records of which have mysteriously vanished shortly afterwards. In this way, an uncertain number of Unforgiven Chapters have been created, each giving every outward appearance of fighting their own wars for the Imperium, while secretly aiding in the Dark Angels' hidden hunt.
THE ANGELS OF VENGEANCE
Of those successor Chapters first created from the sundering of the Dark Angels Legion, the Angels Of Vengeance embody one particular aspect of the Dark Angels' character above all others - a stubborn devotion to their cause that borders on fanaticism. The Chapter is wont to become embroiled in battles that other forces would have little hope of winning, and emerging bloodied but victorious. The Angels Of Vengeance have willingly suffered horrific casualties in the name of victory - a result of their absolute refusal to retreat in the face of any foe. The Chapter's very future has been put in jeopardy more than once, beginning with their appalling depletion during the Forgotten Wars. More recently, in the aftermath of the Siege of San Apolis, their losses were so extreme that the Chapter was forced to spend almost a century rebuilding before it could do battle once more.
When the Angels Of Vengeance were brought into being during the Second Founding, Paladin-Master Ambrus Kuhn, the commander of the Dark Angels Legion's 7th Order, was chosen to be its first Chapter Master. Of all the 1st Legion's Masters, Kuhn was regarded as an oddity, and had, of all the Legion's command staff present in the aftermath of Caliban's destruction, argued the hardest for the truth of the events that had conspired to be revealed to the broader Imperium. He had contended that no loyalist Legion had escaped the fires of Horus' heresy untarnished and that if the Masters of the Legion united together against the storm of accusations and scrutiny that was sure to follow such a revelation, that the Legion would be stronger for it, able to pursue their vengeance against their traitor brothers openly and without remorse of fear of reproach, claiming to do otherwise - to bury the truth in shrouds of lies and secrecy - was what had helped tear the Legion asunder in the first place.
Kuhn's heated opposition to the Legion's decision stemmed, at least in part, from a difference in origin; Kuhn, unlike the majority of those surviving members of the Legion was not a Calibanite, and was instead Terran-born, bearing The Reaper honour mark that denoted those who had served in the conquest of the Sol System proudly upon his pauldron. Like most surviving Terran veterans, Kuhn was a prideful warrior, ill-disposed to the excessive shrouds of secrecy, ritual, and tradition their Calibanite brethren operated under. And in the wake of the ruling council's decision to keep the true events of Caliban's destruction a secret, Kuhn divorced himself from the internal hierarchy of the Legion, declaring himself in self-imposed exile, never to return.
Kuhn did not depart the ruins of Caliban alone, however, instead accompanied by several other Masters, Paladins and Captains of the Legion - mostly Terran veterans themselves - their forces adding to Kuhn's own as he led them into what would later become known as The Scouring. Immediately following his self-imposed exile, Kuhn and his warriors would wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to their Penitent Crusade. Some amongst them fought to prove themselves still worthy of the Lion and the Emperor, others bled to make right their failures during the Fall Of Caliban. Yet, no matter the finer details of each battle-brothers individual reasoning, all were united in the belief that there could be no true forgiveness for their failings, not with the Lion missing, presumed dead, and the Emperor confined to the Golden Throne. With their path to redemption seemingly lost to them, only vengeance remained. Seven years later, following the retreat of most of the Traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror and Roboute Guilliman's announcement of his Codex Astartes, it would be the survivors of these very same warriors who would go on to become the first Angels Of Vengeance under the newly appointed Chapter Master Kuhn.
Unlike the Dark Angels and their other successors, the Angels Of Vengeance would not forsake the Legion's panoply of old, instead, embracing The Reaper honour mark that all battle-brothers of Kuhn's crusade had adopted as a sign of unity of purpose as their Chapter badge. Their Chapter colours and badge a symbol of their unwavering dedication to the ideals of the Great Crusade. Kuhn and his Angels of Vengeance would proudly uphold the memory and honour of the 1st Legion, even if the other successors could not. After their official formation, the Angels Of Vengeance immediately embarked upon a new Imperial Crusade to eliminate any and all Traitor forces and Chaos infestations that still lingered throughout the Segmentum Obscurus, a crusade they would unceasingly pursue for nearly several-dozen centuries.
In the millennia that have followed the Chapter's founding the Angels of Vengeance have become known for their unrelenting hatred of any enemies of the Imperium of Man, as they constantly seek out the threats of Xenos, Heretics and apostates so that they may do battle. The Chapter is said to be so utterly dedicated to its duty that its brethren think or speak of little else. This drive extends beyond a simple devotion to duty, into an all-consuming obsession. So much so, that potential allies are often cowed by these Battle-Brothers' cold-blooded determination and icy single-mindedness. This has led to the Angels of Vengeance holding little regard for the strategies of other forces, relentlessly pursuing their own battle plans regardless of the schemes others might have set in motion. And on numerous occasions, this behaviour has led to a battle being won at the expense of an entire campaign, the Angels of Vengeance caring only that their own immediate objectives are obtained regardless of the wider picture.
The Chapter's attitude might long ago have led to it being entirely ostracised by any of the Imperium's armies beside which it might take to the field. This is not the case, however, for the Chapter embodies one particular aspect of Dark Angels' character above all others - a stubborn devotion to their cause that borders on fanaticism. The Chapter is want to become embroiled in battles that other forces would have little hope of winning, their all-consuming dedication to the mission translating into a total rejection of the notion of failure. It is true that the Space Marines of the Adeptus Astartes indeed 'know no fear,' but the Angels of Vengeance are so relentless and stubborn in their approach to battle that they refuse even to re-deploy. Even in the face of overwhelming odds, the Angels of Vengeance fight on, frequently emerging from the fires of battle having sustained enormous losses, but having earned such victories as lesser warriors could only dream of. The Chapter's very future has been put in jeopardy more than once, beginning with their appalling depletion during the Forgotten Wars. More recently, in the aftermath of the Siege of San Apolis, the Chapter was forced to spend almost a century rebuilding before it could do battle once more.
CHAPTER ORGANISATION
Thoughout their history, the Angels of Vengeance have suffered debilitating levels of casualties countless times, each and every occasion more than capable of bringing an ordinary Chapter to its knees. Yet, the Angels of Vengeance are not a normal Chapter and have managed to avoid crippling events like the Siege of San Apolis becoming an all too regular occurrence by an almost excessive deviation from the Codex Astartes, more so than any other Unforgiven Chapter.
The most glaring divergence from the standard Codex Adherent Chapter organisation would be the fact that the Angels of Vengeance field fifteen Company-like formations, called Orders, not the Codex-standard ten. Of these fifteen Orders, two, the first and second Orders, are comparable to the Dark Angels' Deathwing and Ravenwing, known as the Dreadwing and the Raptorwing. Another notable omission is the Angels of Vengeance's lack of a dedicated Scout Company, each individual Order instead maintaining at least a couple dozen unassigned Neophytes; these adolescent recruits will undergo intense daily training under the supervision of the Order's Chaplains before being accepted as a full-Initiate and assigned his first combat duties in one of the Order's Initiate squads.
In a further deviation from the Codex Astartes, the Chapter's third-through-fifteenth Orders are not separated into Battle Companies and Reserve Companies as they would be in other Unforgiven Chapters, with the third-to-fifth Companies belonging to the former, and the rest the latter. In their place, the Angels of Vengeance divides their remaining thirteen Orders into two categories: Crusade Orders and Reserve Orders. Furthermore, unlike other Chapters, any of the Angels of Vengeance's Orders can be either a Crusader Order or a Reserve Order. Of these two, Crusade Orders bare the main duties of combat, with each sworn to a particular mission upon the Order's appointment to a Crusade-footing. At inception, these Crusade Orders can number anywhere between one-hundred to two-hundred-or-so Battle-Brothers, the vast majority of these being untempered Initiates, with a small assortment of more experienced and veteran squads interspersed amongst them. While in comparison, a Reserve Order upon designation will often only consist of a couple dozen of the Order's most hardened warriors, reforged time and time again in the most cataclysmic warzones known to Humanity, as such, a Reserve Order will often spend several years, if not decades, recouping their losses while assisting in nearby Crusade Orders' campaigns.
It is only through this shifting and cycling of the Orders, as well as their vast recruitment population that the Chapter has managed to maintain its presence amongst the stars as well as it has. Without either of these, the Angels of Vengeance may have long passed into legend.
VENGEANCE
For nearly six-thousand years following their founding, the Angels of Vengeance existed as a Fleet-Based Chapter, claiming no single world as their own, instead preferring to operate within their numerous crusade fleets, establishing Chapter Keeps on every world they conquered or reclaimed throughout the Ultima Segmentum and beyond. It was only through this vast, unnumbered amount of recruiting worlds that the Chapter had managed to sustain itself through the centuries, and even then, there had been more than one occasion in the Chapter's history where even these worlds were not enough to prevent the Chapter's numbers from becoming dangerously depleted. As millennia passed, and the Chapter's leadership ceded from one Chapter Master to the next, the Angels of Vengeance began to concede that if they wished to continue persecuting battle in the Emperor's name effectively, that they would need to find a way to further increase their recruiting population, and plans to establish a Chapter Homeworld were drawn up.
For over two Solar Centuries, the Chapter's exploratory fleets and emissaries scoured the length and breadth of the Eastern Fringe, searching for a suitable system in which to claim their homeworld. It was an arduous task, for the Eastern Fringe was - and remains to this day - largely unexplored; home to both a variety of unknown Xenos as well as numerous widely dispersed and isolated human colony worlds. More than one ship and even a whole exploratory fleet were lost during this period but the Angels of Vengeance did not falter, commanding their emissaries further and further into uncharted space. Until, eventually, the 16th exploratory fleet came across system 16-81 Lambda, otherwise known to local Rogue Traders as the Sildan System.
The Sildan System was, like many other such systems in the Eastern Fringe, a long-forgotten and isolated human colony, separated from the rest of Humanity at some point during the Age of Strife. The system itself consisted of eight planets orbiting around a main-sequence star roughly seventeen times larger than Sol. Of those eight planets, only two were habitable - the fifth and seventh planets of the system - with both planets boasting technologically-advanced feudal cultures. The fifth planet, at the time known as Praelium, was heavily populated, its governance divided between three warring Knight Houses, each vying for dominion over the planet's largest and most resource-rich continent.
At the time of the Angels of Vengeance's first arrival in-system, the current hostilities had been ongoing for over a century, though this was only the most recent of a long list of planetary conflicts dating back to before the time of the Great Crusade. No records detailing just how this unending cycle of war had started had survived the passage of time, yet each side in the conflict had wracked up too many blood debts for the others to allow any one-side to take control of the continent unopposed. And with each flare of hostilities, scores of Knights would be deployed into battle, each of the Knight Houses only able to properly maintain and equip their forces through the prodigal production facilities of the seventh planet's Forge Moon, Praxus. Settled some centuries after Praelium, Praxus' Cult Mechanicus settlers colonised the moon in order the secure its rich deposits of precious metals and minerals for themselves, rendering their services impartially to the Knight Houses of Praelium in exchange for vast tithes of resources mined from the planet's surface.
Isolated as they were from the rest of the Imperium, these Tech-priests had managed to retain in their possession various assorted STC templates heretofore assumed lost to Humanity, including several designs now considered highly heretical by the modern Adeptus Mechanicus. So it was, that when the Angels of Vengeance formally arrived in-system and declared their intent to claim the system as their own, that an accord was struck between the Adeptus Astartes and the Tech-priests of Praxus. In exchange for backing the Chapter's claim over Praelium and supplying them with all the weapons, equipment and technology they needed, the Tech-priests were allowed to retain their monopoly over the STC fragments they possessed, so long as they refrained from pursuing any forbidden avenues of technology. Hard-pressed by the Angels of Vengeance's revelations on the state of decline in the Imperium's technology, the Tech-priests readily accept the terms of the agreement, helping to bring peace to Praelium and beginning construction upon what would become the Chapter's Fortress Monastery.
In the centuries that have followed, Praelium, and the Sildan system at large - know both simply known as Vengeance - have become a lynchpin for both the Sub-sector and the Sector at large, the system itself having weathered devastating attacks from the Necron Arrynmarok Dynasty, the T'au Empire's Second and Third Sphere Expansions, the Ork Empire of Jagga, and splinters of the Tyranid Hive Fleet Kraken, each one dashing themselves to pieces against the Angels of Vengeance's impenetrable defences. The planet Vengeance itself boasts the most impressive of these defences, with its largest continent dominated by the heavily fortified Black Mountains, a series of interconnected mountain ranges which form the basis of the Angels of Vengeance's Fortress Monastery, known as the Obsidian Tower. Each individual mountain in these chains is a formidable bastion in its own right, bristling with defence lasers, macro cannon turrets, and powerful void shields capable of warding off orbital bombardments or sustained assaults from Titan god-machines.
Beyond the great slopes of the mountains, amongst the grasslands and great-forests of the continent lies the planetary capital of Triquetra. Established in the wake of the Angels of Vengeance's descent on to the planet as a neutral location for the Knight House of the planet to convene, Triquetra quickly flourished, soon becoming the planet's largest and most prosperous city. It is here that the High Kings of the Knight Houses and their Barons gather for the High Conclave, a once-in-a-decade event composed of a series of trials, from which the Supreme High King of the planet will be crowned. Each High Conclave is vastly different from the last, with that year's hosting Knight House determining the specific number of trials and their contents, with displays of martial prowess or skill being the most common of trials.
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