Black Legion - Specialist Formations: Aphotic Blade - After he assumed control of the XVIth Legion, Abaddon formed from the Black Legion's ranks a personal bodyguard called the Aphotic Blade and known as the "Bringers of Despair" by their enemies, among other dark titles. Selected from the strongest and most vicious of his Terminator elite, these fearsome warriors are a terrifying sight, their arrival announcing the presence of the Despoiler himself.Hounds of Abaddon - The Hounds of Abaddon are a special formation of Chaos Space Marines found within the Black Legion who are wholly dedicated to the service of Khorne. Within the ranks of the Black Legion, the greatest of the Traitor Legions which serves Chaos Undivided, there still exist thousands of devotees of the Blood God Khorne. These Khornate Berserkers are always at the forefront of the Legion's assaults, charging and howling into the fray. These formations are known as the Hounds of Abaddon, who revel in close combat, where they can spill the greatest volume of blood for their god, using razor-toothed Chainaxes, wicked Lightning Claws or even their own mutant fangs. Though the Hounds are not a single unified warband within the Black Legion, they are led by Urkrathos, the current Lord Purgator of the Chosen of Abaddon and commander of the Legion's Black Fleet. Urkrathos claims all followers of Khorne within the Legion as his own and directs them according to the will of Abaddon the Despoiler, the Legion's Warmaster.Bringers of Decay - The Bringers of Decay are a special formation of Chaos Space Marines found within the Black Legion who are wholly dedicated to Nurgle. The Plague God has a strong following within the Black Legion; his putrid touch is evident throughout the ranks of its warriors. Under the dominance of the Chosen of Abaddon lieutenant Skyrak Slaughterborn, the current Lord Corruptor, the Nurglites have converted many to their cause. In battle, the Bringers of Decay are Abaddon's plague carriers and heralds of contagion, often appearing before other warbands of the Legion to sow infection and sickness amongst the foe. This could also be why many other warbands of the Black Legion will have little to do with the Bringers of Decay, repelled by the blessings of the Plague God they bear, and the pervasive stench that follows them.Children of Torment - The Children of Torment are a special formation of Chaos Space Marines found within the Black Legion who are wholly dedicated to the service of Slaanesh. Hundreds of followers of the Pleasure God have sworn their allegiance to Abaddon the Despoiler and joined the ranks of the Black Legion. Under the guidance of warlords such as Devram Korda, they are comprised of multiple powerful warbands which comprise this hedonistic collective. These devotees of the Prince of Pleasure bow to Abaddon, for he grants them unending opportunities to wallow in the pleasure provided by the anguish of his mortal victims, and feed upon their gushing lifeblood. Even though they are devotees of Slaanesh, the Children of Torment are despised by members of the Emperor's Children, who see them as traitors to the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim and lapdogs of a lesser Warmaster.Sons of the Cyclops - The Sons of the Cyclops are a special formation of Chaos Space Marines found within the Black Legion who are wholly dedicated to the service of Tzeentch. The Sons of the Cyclops are the smallest of the formations dedicated to a single Chaos God within the Black Legion. Consisting of the followers of the Lord of Change, including Chaos Sorcerers and their attending Rubricae, the Sons of the Cyclops hold an amount of power completely disproportionate to their diminutive numbers within the Black Legion. This is because of the many favours Abaddon the Despoiler lavishes upon the Sons of the Cyclops' leaders; powerful psykers and sorcerers like Zaraphiston and Ygethmor the Deceiver. Gifted seers and diviners, they make up the core of Abaddon's closest and most trusted advisors, peering into the future and guiding the multiple components of a Black Crusade toward Abaddon's ultimate goals.The Tormented - The warband known as The Tormented regroups all the Possessed Chaos Space Marines counted amongst the Black Legion's ranks into one formation. Those members of the Black Legion who take further steps on the road to power and merge their soul with a daemon, inviting a Warp-entity into their flesh and drinking deep of the Neverborn's corrupted power, forsake their allegiance to their former warband and join the ranks of The Tormented. Since their cataclysmal inception during the defence of the corpse of Horus on the Daemon World of Maeleum, the ranks of the Tormented have swollen and their influence grown. Each Battle-Brother of The Tormented has a dark reflection in the Warp, the twinned sentience of the daemon sharing the corrupted Astartes' mind. These daemons, unsurprisingly, have their own agendas and will act upon those when the opportunity arises, making the warband as a whole a rather unstable and unpredictable tool of war, yet none can deny their horrific visciousness in battle. The most powerful of the Possessed Legionaries are granted the honour of serving as Navigators on the Black Legion's warships, as the blasphemous mingling of Materium- and Immaterium-born minds grants a Possessed the perspective to guide a ship through the Warp with a speed and precision no other can hope to match.The Oath-Broken - Those that dare betray the Warmaster seldom live long enough to regret their mistake, and those who do quickly come to regret their folly bitterly as their bodies and souls are subjected to the most abject of agonies. The Oath-Broken are no true traitors to Abaddon, but merely those who failed in their assigned tasks, or got badly mauled on the battlefield and crippled by horrendous wounds. Failures and cripples invariably lose the fickle attention of their mortal and immortal masters alike, and without the blessings of the Powers of the Warp to mend their limbs or knit their broken bodies together with mutations, the Oath-Broken are forced to fashion their own crude replacements: blades sutured to stumps, xenos appendages crudely grafted into empty sockets and ragged armour patched with whatever material the Eye of Terror deems to provide. And yet, woe to the fool who underestimates these dregs of the Black Legion, for an Oath-Broken's desire to again bask in the glories that only Chaos can provide is only equal to his hatred of any who still do.Sarissan Iron Pact - The Sarissan Iron Pact is a large sub-faction within the inner circle of the Black Legion that operates directly under the command of Abaddon the Despoiler. The Iron Pact can trace its origins to the Sons of Horus and the Luna Wolves before them, when they served as the 28th Armoured Assault Company in the Legion of the Primarch Horus himself. Ordo Malleus archives state that this company was present throughout many of the Warmaster's campaigns during the Horus Heresy, and was particularly active in the northern war zones of the Segmentum Obscurus. The 28th Comprised a core of squads including Terminators and Breacher Squads, all mounted in a variety of tanks, including a speartip of Spart Heavy Assault Transports. At some point during the Scouring, the 28th Armoured Assault Company was dissolved or ceased to exist in its established form, but from its remnants arose the Sarissan Iron Pact. This group sided with Abaddon in the conflicts that sundered his Legion and by its end had been rendered down to a kernel of Spartans and Land Raiders, supported by a small number of surviving Land Raider Achilles'. The squads that were once part of the 28th fractured and split during the Scouring, leaving the Iron Pact as a cadre of highly experienced vehicle crew in command of several dozen of the heaviest assault transports ever constructed. The Despoiler calls upon the services of the Sarissan Iron Pact when his inner circle of Chosen Terminator squads are tasked with launching all-out assaults upon the most heavily defended positions. They are also highly effective in operating in the most hazardous of environments, for the Spartan in particular was constructed to transport infantry through war zones alight with ravening plasma. Thus, no world is immune from the wrath of Abaddon the Despoiler.