Blood Ravens - Possible Thousand Sons Origins: Please Note: The following is informed speculation based on the sources, and is NOT recognised as canon.The Blood Ravens' dark secret may be that they have descended not from one of the Loyalist First Founding Chapters but from the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion, as before the Thousand Sons' homeworld of Prospero was destroyed by the Space Wolves during the Horus Heresy, the XV Legion sent a portion of their forces far from their homeworld in their Legion fleet.These Astartes were not transported to the Eye of Terror under the deal their Primarch Magnus the Red made with the Chaos God Tzeentch to save the Legion's lives in return for their service to the Changer of Ways. This would mean that the Blood Ravens Chapter is not actually a Successor Chapter but is technically a remnant of one of the First Founding Legions, though with a dark and tainted past.In the book Dawn of War: Ascension, it is revealed that the ancestors of the Blood Ravens built a recruiting world on top of an ancient Necron outpost during the Horus Heresy, with the help of the Craftworld Aeldari. The two races worked in unison, using Aeldari psychic disciplines and wards to lock the Necron force lying beneath the sands in psychic stasis. The Horus Heresy-era Space Marines were then tasked with protecting this outpost by the Aeldari, to seal in the Necron threat, but they mysteriously abandoned it.It was left unrecorded in Imperial logs until the Blood Ravens rediscovered it. The Craftworld Aeldari mistook the Blood Ravens for being one and the same as the Heresy-era Space Marines, as they too wore similar red power armour, which was also the colour of the pre-Heresy Thousand Sons Astartes' power armour before their corruption by Chaos.The psychic lock the Space Marines placed on the Necrons shows that the Astartes of that time could not have already been Blood Angels, and the Thousand Sons share a bond with the Blood Ravens because both groups of Space Marines are defined by the development of unusually strong psychic powers among their battle-brothers after their gene-seed implantation.In the novel Battle for the Abyss, Mhotep, a Thousand Sons Legion psyker, whilst fighting the Daemon Wsoric aboard the starship Wrathful, responded to the Daemon's question of what did the entities of the Warp have to fear from the Emperor with the response, "Knowledge...is power," suggesting a connection to the Blood Ravens (pg. 396). Since the Daemon had been manifested in realspace for so long, Mhotep was able to destroy its physical form and banish it back to the Warp before he died of his many wounds.In the novel A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill, a vision is seen by the Remembrancer and historiographer Kallista Eris describing a future image of blood and a raven, and a Remembrancer psyker attached to the Thousand Sons has a vision of "...The Ravens, I see them too! The lost sons and a Raven of Blood. They cry out for salvation and knowledge, but it is denied!" (pg. 430) This may imply that the Blood Ravens are descended from the Thousand Sons' gene-seed. At the same time, one of the four arcane cults of Librarians that comprised the pre-Heresy Thousand Sons Legion was called the Corvidae (the Latin name for ravens and crows), and whose symbol was a black raven's head, thus making it possible that the Blood Ravens were Thousand Sons Astartes who largely belonged to the Corvidae Cult.Kallista not only predicted the future destruction of the Thousand Sons' ancient homeworld of Prospero at the Space Wolves' hands, but she may also have described the eventual formation of the Loyalist Blood Ravens. During her final psychic episode, Kallista also screamed out in anguish about the "ravens of blood", and that they were "lost, crying out for their unknown father." In her death throes she declared that they would be defined by their need to "seek knowledge and artefacts of old", which is an important activity often pursued by the Blood Ravens, particularly in their search to learn more about their own origins.Since the Blood Ravens are a fleet-based Chapter, it is possible that they descended from those Astartes aboard the Thousand Sons' own armada before they were forced to flee Prospero, which Magnus the Red had ordered to the far ends of the galaxy so that the Space Wolves could purge Prospero without having to face the Thousand Sons' fleet. The Thousand Sons Space Marines aboard that armada were also never transported by the will of Tzeentch through the Warp with Magnus and the planetside Astartes to the Planet of the Sorcerers in the Eye of Terror, as they were far beyond the edge of Thousand Sons space and were not affected by the internecine fighting.In the anthology Age of Darkness, the short story Rebirth by Chris Wraight revolves around a squad of Thousand Sons Space Marines that return to their devastated homeworld of Prospero after the sanctioned Scouring of Prospero carried out by Primarch Leman Russ and his Space Wolves. After the Council of Nikaea, and the rebukement of Magnus the Red, a recall order was transmitted throughout the Legion, with the bulk of the Legion being present on Prospero just before the events surrounding the Fall of Prospero happened.However, some of the Thousand Sons' Astartes had survived as they had not arrived before these events occurred. This would include those Thousand Sons that had been sent away aboard their Legion's fleet elements such as Captain Menes Kalliston of the 4th Fellowship. Six solar months after the sanctioned action against their Legion, Captain Kalliston led a squad of battle-brothers to the ravaged surface of their homeworld to seek for any signs of survivors or their beloved primarch. Instead, the squadron of Thousand Sons are taken by surprise when they encounter a much larger force of World Eaters who are also on Prospero for their own nefarious reasons.In the ensuing conflagration, the majority of the squadron is killed, and their captain is captured by none other than the infamous Captain Khârn of the World Eaters' 8th Assault Company and Equerry to Primarch Angron. Only Revuel Arvida, a Sergeant of the 4th Fellowship and a member of the Corvidae Cult, manages to survive. Like all Corvidae, Arvida is skilled in the psychic discipline of precognition and the determination of the likely probabilities of future events. Despite his bleak circumstances, Arvida knew -- as only a Corvidae could know -- that death would not find him on Prospero.That was no consolation for everything that had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency. He would survive and live to discover the true causes of his Legion's destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ. He is quoted as saying, "Knowledge is power," suggesting another connection to the Blood Ravens (pg. 162). Ironically, the symbol of the Corvidae Cult's discipline is that of a black raven's head. Arvida would in time go one to become Janus, the first Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights, and the Blood Ravens are one of the only Chapters in the Imperium that the Grey Knight have allowed to know of their existence.In the novel Dawn of War: Tempest by C.S. Goto, during an incident on the world of Arcadia, a fabled library world of the elusive Harlequins, a Blood Ravens Librarian named Rhamah suffered amnesia and fell in with the notorious sorcerous Chaos warband, the Prodigal Sons, which at that time was led by the Exalted Sorcerer Ahzek Ahriman. During his time with the warband, Ahriman refers to the Blood Raven variously as "Son of Ahriman," "Friend of Ahriman" and as a "lost brother." Further evidence shows a link between the Thousand Sons and the Blood Ravens when Rhamah discovers an ancient Aeldari tome known as the Un-Founding, which mysteriously bears the crest of the Blood Ravens upon its cover.Ahriman acknowledges that he too, once owned a copy of this tome and that another one was in the possession of Azariah Vidya, Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens in the 37th Millennium. Ahriman states, "I knew Vidya better than you might expect.." He also states to Rhamah, "We are not so different, you and I. We were not always so different...there was a time, long ago, before the Change, when the Thousand Sons of Magnus wore the blood-red armour of their primarch." Though these clues are tantalizing, there is no further explanation given as to what many of these statements exactly mean. Also, it should also be noted that Ahriman, as a follower of Tzeentch, is a master of deceit and trickery, who might have been attempting to manipulate Rhamah to use the Blood Ravens Librarian for his own ends all along.Since the Blood Ravens were adopted as an official Chapter by Games Workshop following the introduction of the Dawn of War PC game, subtle hints have been given in a variety of sources that the Blood Ravens are actually a Loyalist Successor Chapter of the Thousand Sons. In particular, their unnaturally high number of Librarians and the Chapter's central focus on the pursuit of knowledge are very similar to the characteristics that once defined the Thousand Sons before their corruption by Chaos. Such a connection to a reviled Traitor Legion would also be a terrible dishonour and would explain why the Blood Ravens' genetic heritage may have been deliberately obscured from the Imperial record by the Chapter's founding generation of Astartes.Against this evidence is the word of the Games Workshop and Black Library author Laurie Golding who on the Tapatalk First Expedition Warhammer 40,000 message board explicitly refuted that the Blood Ravens were successors of the Thousand Sons. However, Golding offered no other evidence and it is not clear if the remark was made in jest.