Blood Angels - A Descent Into Madness: With each victory, the dire legends that surrounded the IXth Legion grew and spread. They were the spectres that haunted the wild places at the edge of the Great Crusade's advance, the terrors loosed by the Emperor to clear His path across the stars. It was a duty and title they accepted with grim pride, never shirking the mantle that they wore in His name and never baulking from the tasks assigned them.Each campaign was undertaken with a cold fury that stood them apart from the Emperor's other attack dogs and hidden murderers, a quiet, brooding hunger for blood and death that was as terrifying as it was effective. Once committed to battle, the IXth did not relent, did not retreat, and could not be stopped. They fought until the enemy was utterly destroyed and paid no heed to the thought of mercy or the need to build an empire rather than a graveyard.Few among the mighty and renowned welcomed their presence on the eve of battle, for the stench of death and madness was ever on them. So, lacking a patron among the handful of returned primarchs to guide them and give purpose to their conflicts, the IXth Legion slipped further into isolation and infamy. It became home to a strange mixture of Imperial doctrine and crimson ritual, its ranks and formations riddled with charnel cults and bloody prophets of war, the superstitions of a hundred worlds given power by the nature of their transformation and left to fester on the worst battlefields of the Great Crusade.Worse, the appearance of these blood-soaked angels, tall and striking, perhaps even more so when caked in the gore of the battlefield, often set those they brought into the Imperium to their worship, lest they anger the red angels that had come. It was a slide towards madness that would see the end of the Legion. For were it not abated, it would become a worse danger to the Imperium than the monsters it was made to hunt.The seeds of this destruction were already sown, with many watching the Legion and its commanders, already distrustful of the Immortal Ninth and its blood-soaked killers. The IXth Legion's 14th Company was sanctioned by Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists for its actions during the Second Siege of Yarant, where the IXth Legion's warriors took to killing and consuming prisoners on the walls of the fortress to demoralise the enemy, as well as to secure intelligence.While the Imperial Army brought grievance against the Legion after reports were filed that mortally wounded soldiers of the Malagant Rifles Regiment had been slaughtered and drained of their blood by the IXth Legion rather than left to the mercy of the enemy during the retreat from Shedim. Such brutal necessities seemed of little concern to the IXth Legion, but served only to add weight to those who claimed they should share the fate of the other two failed Legions.Broken apart by the dictates of war and the needs of the Great Crusade, the IXth Legion became outcasts among the brotherhood of the Space Marine Legions. Now they fought in small isolated companies, each fostering its own distinct brand of the red cults that had spread across the Legion. They still maintained a force mostly composed of line infantry and jump troops, but less from tactical expediency and more due to the Divisio Militaris' reluctance to supply them with more potent arms and munitions.In the face of this, the Legion turned more and more to its own macabre methods to win battles, prizing victory more highly than the respect of their peers. Bitter pride in what they saw as the jealousy of others sustained them, but also served to drag them further into disrepute.The IXth Legion stood upon a knife's edge. They were still a necessary, if bloody, piece of the Emperor's plan to conquer the galaxy, yet that conquest would not last forever and eventually the IXth would become more of a burden in the new golden age built by the Emperor than a blessing. A reckoning approached for the IXth Legion. They would either be born anew, changed and not lessened as they had been before, or they would be ended and expunged from history.It was at this crucial time that a scout flotilla of the Great Crusade was to discover an otherwise insignificant world of ruins and deserts, a world whose moons also had their own legends of a bloody angel, a world called Baal.