Death Company - On the Field of Battle: No Blood Angels commander treats his Death Company brothers with careless abandon. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the soulful nature and humanity inherent in the hearts of Sanguinius' sons. In accordance with the Chapter's merciful temperament, the Death Company are rarely deployed to be lost in useless sacrifice.They are a tactical asset like any other, but more than that, they are a vision of an inevitable fate: every Blood Angel will one day wear the same black ceramite and charge alongside a chanting Chaplain while lost to the delusions of a mythic age. Battle-Brothers that have already fallen to such a doom are treated with respect and honour. "It is our duty," an ancient Blood Angels litany goes, "to know the difference between the doomed and the damned."This is far from a universal truth among the Successor Chapters. More than one of the Blood Angels' kindred bloodlines are known to take a much harsher, punitive attitude to their battle-lost brothers, hurling their Death Companies into the fray with no concern for their lives and using them as a blunt instrument to break enemy front lines no matter the cost.Flesh Tearers officers have displayed such merciless disregard many times across the span of millennia, as have the Chaplains of the Angels Numinous, the Flesh Eaters, and now-extinct Chapters such as the Golden Sons and the Crimson Legion. Every Death Company is marked by unpredictability, not least because of its warriors' melancholic madness.When these doomed Space Marines take to the battlefield, they are usually armed with a motley assortment of wargear -- each Blood Angel bears the weapons he wielded among his former squad, so Bolters are almost as common as Chainswords. Ranking officers will bring more sacred, relic weapons such as Thunder Hammers or Power Swords, but no matter how a Death Company is equipped, they can be relied upon to tear their way through the enemy in a loose phalanx of enraged warriors.Chapters with a less reverent attitude to their afflicted brethren frequently field Death Companies equipped with Jump Packs, hurling their black-clad brothers into the heart of the enemy army to inflict terrible punishment while the rest of the Space Marines strike force moves to capitalise on the foe's disorder.And while many Chapters consider a benevolent perspective regarding the lost souls of a Death Company, every Blood Angels Successor Chapter can point to countless listings in their fortress's archives, citing darkly glorious last stands where these warriors in black died fighting insurmountable odds, so that the rest of the force could achieve its objective. As bleak as such a sacrifice can be, such is the burden of service in the End Times. Only in death does duty end.For all the darkness of this curse flowing through the bloodstreams of the Angel's descendants, the Black Rage offers a certain mournful glory to those in its thrall. All sensation, all pain, is stolen from their flesh; Death Company warriors will wade through volleys of gunfire that would force even Veteran Space Marines to their knees, and fight on despite the loss of limbs and the rupture of vital organs.Every virtue of vitality and strength within the gen-hanced soldiers of the Adeptus Astartes is magnified in these doomed Blood Angels. More than one loremaster has speculated that their Primarch's infinite nobility shines through in his sons' bleakest hours, allowing them to meet death with at least the shadow of dignity.True enough, once the fighting is over and their fevered imaginings finally clear, many of the Death Company will finally collapse from their wounds, as their fading madness no longer sustains their broken bodies. Those who survive, for better or worse, are bound by their brothers -- either in chains or in stasis pods -- and returned to the Tower of the Lost, destined to scream the agonised death-echoes of Sanguinius' doom, until they are released to do battle in black once more.In the darkest times the Black Rage has taken an entire strike force. Though this is incredibly rare, the spiritual sickness has been known to sweep through the minds of dozens of Battle-Brothers at once like a shadowed wind, leaving madness in its wake. If any remain untouched it falls to them to lead the rites of anointing. Sometimes there are none left to sanity, and the freshly forged Death Company must guide itself.The few times this has happened have grown into dark legends within the Chapter. The Blood Angels Strike Force Exsanguine succumbed to the Black Rage in its entirety on the eve of the Aurorious landings. None living know what transpired in the hours before the Battle-Brothers emerged from their Drop Pods -- only that when they met the Aeldari warhost on the glittering slopes of Aurorius, a madness had spread through them like a spiritual contagion.In an avalanche of ceramite and howling Chainswords, the Blood Angels hurled themselves into the pale ranks of the aliens, hacking apart their lithe bodies in showers of blood and gore. Even the heavy xenos guns failed to slow the Space Marines' advance, searing bolts of plasma and streams of monofilament rounds merely tearing off chunks of armour and muscle.It had been the intention of the Blood Angels to clear and hold a landing zone for the armies of the Imperium to follow, but such was the fury of the Death Company that the Aeldari line buckled and broke before them, entire formations of Guardians annihilated by the sudden brutality of their foes.It took five full solar days for the Aeldari forces to rally and destroy the Astartes strike force, but by that time they had been all but wiped out in their turn, having suffered horrendous losses in each engagement.