Editing Sanguinius (section)

==The Great Crusade==
[[File:7d9a85e6e4a368bb435e943fc891a25b.jpg|thumbnail|right|250px|Sanguinius (left) and Horus whooping some ass together before [[Erebus|SOMEBODY]] had to go and damn the Imperium to an eternity of [[Grimdark|war, cultural stagnation, paranoia and self destructive behaviour]].]]
Joining the [[Great Crusade]], Sanguinius became best buds with fellow Primarchs [[Horus]], [[Roboute Guilliman]], [[Magnus the Red]], [[Jaghatai Khan]] and [[Rogal Dorn]]. Ironically (and later, tragically), his friendship with Horus is said to have been closer than that of any of the other Primarchs. Which, this being Warhammer, went straight to hell when the [[Horus Heresy]] started. He was easily the most [[Pretty Marines|fabulous]] of all the Emperor's generals (SUCK IT [[Fulgrim|FULGRIM]]); he wore a glowing, ornate set of golden artificer armor adorned with huge rubies which represented Terra, Baal, and Baal's moons, and his magnificent white wings would spread behind him as he took to the skies of the battlefield. But Sanguinius's beauty was not merely skin deep, as Fulgrim's often was. For instance, the Khan noted during a small family chat that while Sanguinius and Fulgrim were similarly resplendent, Sanguinius was completely at ease in his aspect, where Fulgrim seemed a bit brittle. At the same time, the Great Angel gave the impression that he'd be perfectly willing to cast off his finery, whereas Fulgrim gave the impression that he would rather die. Basically, in Sanguinius' case, [[Games Workshop|Geedubs]] abandoned all pretense of being subtle about the whole "the Emperor is God, the primarchs are the archangels, and Horus is Lucifer" thing—like, to the point that Sanguinius became known simply as "The Angel" among the armies of mankind. 

After a short stint on Terra and a quick tour with Horus, Sang' got reunited with his Legion, which up to that point... kind of had a nasty reputation as being the ones to take on foul jobs and [[/tg/ gets shit done|getting them done]] [[Grimdark|no matter how hostile the warzone]] and laden with rumours of... just as foul behaviour (they weren't known as [[cannibalism|The Eaters of the Dead]] for no reason.) Being the bro'est of the bro's, Sanguinius didn't go all [[Lorgar|preachy]], [[Perturabo|vindictive]] or [[Angron|homicidally]] [[Night Haunter|insane]] on them; he merely told them: "Guys, show me what you've got." He came, saw and what he liked (like their tenacity and valor at arms) he promoted. What he didn't like (like the charnel rites of succession) he worked to contain and minimize, but without punishment or chastisement. What they lacked (like an appreciation of anything beside war) he endeavored to teach them. It is telling that, in a record amount of time, the newly christened (hah!) "Blood Angels" went from one of the most reviled to one of the most beloved Legions under his guidance. 

He did some pretty cool shit during the Crusade too, at one point taking on an entire blood-mad Eldar Craftworld with a third of his Legion. Admittedly it was a struggle - the Craftworld fielded Wraiths in large numbers - and had to deploy the Ordo Sinister psy-Titans after massive Eldar Wraith machines destroyed his Legio Fureans allies, but still, Sanguinius managed to tear the head off one of the walkers. Not a sparkly, feathery man to fuck with.

Though not first in favor among the Emprah's Primarchs (that position belonged to Horus, pre-heresy), [[Magnus the Red|or the biggest psychic powerhouse]], [[Roboute Guilliman|or the best at empire-building]], [[Lorgar|or even the one who looked most like Dad]], Sanguinius was said to have the best ''blend'' of the Big E's attributes (which, considering the fact that space marines are a toned-down version of their primarchs, may imply the Blood Angels are the most similar to the Emperor). While a lot of the Space Marine legions and their generals fought in the Great Crusade just for the sake of glory and a good battle, Sanguinius and his Blood Angels fought for what the Emperor himself did: [[Noblebright|a better galaxy, a peaceful galaxy, one where humanity would be united, happy, and prosperous]]. During the Crusade, the Blood Angels formed a friendly rivalry with the [[World Eaters]] legion (yet another relationship the Horus Heresy would royally buttfuck), because both were noted for being assault-oriented shock troops; however, while they were pretty evenly matched in their level of prowess, saddled with the Butcher's Nails, the World Eaters were straight-up lunatics in combat, whereas the Blood Angels' ferocity was channeled and refined when it needed to be by Sanguinius' wisdom. The World Eaters fury ran hot, where the Blood Angels ran cold. 

Also, everyone loved the guy. Even at the depths of his heresy, even ''Horus'' wished Sanguinius was one of his generals. [[meme|And he was a good guy who doesn't afraid of anything]].

===Signus Prime and Ka'Bandha===
[[Image:Signusianclash.jpg|thumb|left|400px|''"[[Awesome|If you truly do hail from the realm that men once called hell, when you return there, tell your kindred it was Sanguinius who threw you back.]]"'' —Sanguinius, taking a small moment to deliver this line after decapitating a [[Keeper of Secrets]] and [[rip and tear|"relieving"]] [[Khorne]]'s mightiest servant of his wings, and just generally setting the stage for Ka'Bandha's future [[butthurt]].]]

At one point during the Great Crusade, Sanguinius and the Blood Angels were tasked by Warmaster Horus with reclaiming the Signus Cluster from a supposed [[xenos]] infestation and liberating the humans there from their oppressors. However, when they arrived, they found that the entire system had been consumed by the evil influence of the [[Chaos Gods]], and specifically a [[Keeper of Secrets]] calling itself Kyriss [[/d/|the Perverse]]. This was actually a trap set by Horus in an attempt to eliminate Sanguinius early on, because he feared him more than any of his other fellow Primarchs as he was nearly his equal in both combat and commanding. In fact, at one point right before his fall to Chaos, Horus actually admitted to a Remembrancer that he thought that Sanguinius should have been named Warmaster instead of him. Also this was after Horus's corruption and Sanguinius was not aware of the Isstvan conflicts at the time. Long story short, the Blood Angels were stranded in-system, caught off guard, and lost a lot of Marines, ships, and crew, but eventually regrouped and conquered the armies of cultists and Chaos [[daemons]] in the Signus system. Kyriss even manifested on the bridge of the Red Tear, the Blood Angels flagship, from the frames of [[Khorne|eight]] servitors, to taunt Sanguinius. This was also Horus's first true defeat, as there was no benefit gained from the campaign.

But a greater threat soon emerged: [[Ka'bandha]], a powerful [[Bloodthirster]] and one of [[Khorne]]'s greatest servants. He attacked the Blood Angels while taunting Sanguinius in the middle of the battle and claimed that Horus had betrayed him. Refusing to believe this, Sanguinius attacked in [[rage]], and managed to stab his sword right into the daemon's chest and wound him severely. Ka'bandha, almost beaten, distracted the primarch with the truth of horus’s betrayal. Ka'bandha then lashed out with his whip, ensnaring Sanguinius' legs and crushing them. Then, leaving Sanguinius alive for [[Plot armor|some]] [[rage|reason]] (perhaps fearful Sanguinius really would become an angel if he died), then charged off to slay a few hundred Blood Angels. The Red Thirst, already a problem for the Blood Angels, was exacerbated by the psychic shockwaves of each of his sons dying, and Sanguinius vowed that he would take vengeance on Ka'bandha for this atrocity. In the Chaos temple at the centre of the battle, Sanguinius duelled Ka'Bandha again, ripping off a wing and then throwing him off a platform and back through a portal into the realm of Chaos. To top it off, Sanguinius then faced Kyriss and beheaded that sick fuck, promptly ending his rule and Chaos' hold on the system.

In a moment of hesitation, Sanguinius was tempted by the offer of becoming a Chaos Champion in exchange for curing the Red Thirst and Black Rage. Seeing this, Meros jumped straight into the portal, telling his Primarch not to give up hope, turning into the Daemon known as the Red Angel (Meros' geneseed would later be transplanted onto Rafen)

Inspired by his sacrifice Sanguinius was able to say no to the Daemons. This gave him the courage to resist the temptation of Chaos later on when Madai offered the same deal

===Later in the Horus Heresy===
{{topquote|Blade with whom I have lived, blade with whom I now die,<br>serve right and justice one last time, seek one last heart of evil,<br>still one last life of pain. Cut well, old friend, and then farewell.|Sir Orin Neville Smythe}}

After Signus Prime, the majority of the Blood Angels found themselves on the wrong side of the Ruinstorm. Drawn to Macragge by the Pharos, Sanguinius learned that his brothers Guilliman and the Lion were trying to set the beginnings of a second Imperium. Sanguinius reluctantly accepted the premise, and was instated as the Emperor of the Imperium Secundus. Being Emperor didn't sit easily with him, and much of the day-to-day ruling was done by Guilliman and the Lion. After Curze paid him a nasty visit / scrying competition, the Angel demanded more oversight into the affairs of the new Empire. When Curze was finally captured, all three members of the Imperial Triumvirate realised that Terra had not yet fallen, but that Sanguinius would be doomed to die by Horus's hand.

The Angel had in truth already foreseen his death at the hands of Horus, and knew what it would mean for his sons. However, he accepted that his sacrifice was necessary to preserve his father's works in the long run and took solace in the fact that the Blood Angels would continue to follow in his footsteps even as they grappled with the Black Rage. Moreover, via the temptations of chaos he endured with his brothers in the Ruinstorm--he found that the false hope he had been given, namely that he ''could'' survive the end of the Horus Heresy and even triumph, but learned it would come with a terrible cost. He would gain power from Chaos and slay Horus and save his sons from the curse to come--as a [[Wat|Greater Daemon of Chaos Undivided]] made mention that Horus had become an imperfect vessel and that papa-Sang was to take his place as the Angel of Ruin. So in a nutshell it's The Last Temptation of Sanguinius, but with less Willem Dafoe. Naturally space vampire Jesus didn't take the daemon up on the offer and fought his way through a daemon throng until he pinned the daemon halfway through the materium and the warp. In his mind a last defiant act, choosing to neither be slain by Horus or choose chaos, but to die holding the daemon in between the rift to the warp so his Brother-Primarchs could Orbitally Bombard Davin into dust. Unfortunately through vision he realized that the Black Rage would be inevitable, as the proto-rage had filled him by that point, its origins being explained as the violent hatred and rage at the Betrayal of Horus against him and the Emprah, and the sheer pain of his death, existing in the past and future as it resonated through time--and the grief of the death he hadn't experienced yet. [[Doctor Who|Timey Wimey bullshit shenanigans]] aside, if the Jesus metaphors weren't strong enough, [[Sanguinor|Sanguinius' Herald]] stepped up to the plate and planted his sword in the Daemon's spine and held it there so Sanguinius wouldn't have to die there. And with that last act the flickers of hope that had died in Sanguinius rekindled and witnessed the miracle of a new Angel coming into being. The Herald was empowered by the warp, glowing a radiant gold with the outline of wings springing from his shoulders as he became in the Primarch's own words the "Son of my hope". Explaining the origins of one of the Blood Angel's specialest of snowflakes, making him a Draigo/Celestine-esque Daemon Prince of Sanguinius. That sound you're hearing is the noise of every Puritan Inquisitor's blood-vessels bursting in their eyes.

On a positive, because of the Triumvirate of Primarch's success on Davin the [[Warp Storm|Ruinstorm]] abated revealing a straight shot to Terra, on a negative, Horus had left a massive fleet to protect the way there [[Just As Planned|(how he knew that THAT place would be the way that opened for them is a bit of a mystery)]] and all tactical scenarios concluded that if they tried to engage them simultaneously they would only be mired down so that none of them could reach Terra. So the Primarchs decided to split up, taking a page out of the Codex of Brother Vincentius Lombardius, they would split the defense and rush the goal: Guilliman using the sheer bulk of his larger fleet to engage the traitors while the Lion fell back and attacked the traitor Legion's homeworlds, burning them with extreme prejudice, while the Blood Angels hung back long enough for Guilliman to break the bulk of the armada and the Lion to draw away and contend with the forces that splintered away as he burnt their homes, giving us a nice tidy bow of exactly where the hell the other primarchs were when shit happened. As Sanguinius corroborated his visions with Curze, he felt that he had come across a revelation - hence the need for his Legion to be the ones to reach Terra. He may have been fated to perish at the hands of Horus, but even if destiny was set, the consequence could be altered. He would fight and die, but his sacrifice would allow the Imperium to persist. He let Curze in on this, letting him in on the razor-thin hope of the future's mutability; he said he could take the Night Haunter to the Emperor, and that the Big-E could do something Konrad had never thought of exploring: he could forgive him. Just as a spark of hope entered his eyes, Sanguinius promised that he wouldn't allow that for Curze, that he would freeze Curze in stasis and jettison the pod, preserving him for millennia if necessary, and that Konrad Curze had no fucking chance of outrunning or changing his future death, [[Awesome|terrifying 40k batman so hard he'd probably be locked in an eternity of despair as he's frozen in stasis.]]

Good is not nice, indeed.

[[File:Horus vs The Emperor.jpg|thumbnail|right|500px|Unfortunately, this is the image most people know Sanguinius from. (He's the fabulous dead guy lying on the floor.) This also is the least fabulous image of him.]]

With the help of the [[Dark Angels]] and the [[Ultramarines]], the Blood Angels were able to make it back to [[Terra]] in the closing days of the Horus Heresy to defend it from the traitor legions and their daemonic allies. Sanguinius and his legion led the defense of the Imperial Palace itself when the forces of Chaos closed in around it, and the Primarch slew innumerable daemons, traitors and other assorted scum in the process. Oh, and he also ''soloed a Warlord TITAN'' and then scared off its Warhound escorts by glaring at them too hard. A little while later, while singlehandedly defending the Eternity Gate from the entire Chaos force, Ka'Bandha turned up. The two went at it again rather majestically atop the Eternity Gate to the Emperor's throne room, and Sanguinius managed to [[Awesome|SNAP KA'BANDHA'S SPINE OVER HIS MOTHERFUCKING KNEE]]. He then hurled the bastard's corpse back into the throng of Chaos filth below, and the Blood Angels who had died by the Bloodthirster's hand were thus avenged in the most spectacularly badass of ways. As of ''Echoes Of Eternity'', the badassery of this already iconic moment was elevated to new heights. The fight between Sanguinius and Ka'Bandha at the time of the siege was a fight in the same way Kharn obliterating Erebus in the ''Conqueror'''s gladiator pits that one time was also technically a fight (fitting since both books were written by ADB). At this point in the war, Sanguinius' skill and prowess was such that Ka'Bandha could at best be called an annoyance, much in the way that a maybe-rabid raccoon getting into your trash could be described as an annoyance; loud, erratic, not entirely without risk, and it makes a big mess of the surroundings, but that's about it. Suffice it to say though that Ka'Bandha was now ''orders of magnitude'' beneath Sanguinius, and that showed in the brevity of their fight. This was subsequently made even '''more''' apparent however, because maybe 5 in-plot minutes after dispatching Ka'Bandha, Sanguinius was dueling his brother Angron. That proved to be a challenge actually worthy of the Great Angel's time... sort of, but it ended much the same way. We say "sort of" because despite Angron putting up a far better fight than Ka'Bandha had, Sanguinius, in order and at separate times during the duel: destroyed Angron's face/eyes, vaporized one of his arms, stabbed him through the heart, stabbed him through the brainstem, stabbed him through the heart ''again'', and then [[rip and tear|tore the Butcher's Nails, complete with brains and eyes, right out of his skull with his bare hands]]. So he killed or crippled Angron a good 6 times over. Had it not been for Angron's Khorne-given ability to draw power from carnage to regenerate himself, he'd have had nearly as brief a fight with Sanguinius as Ka'Bandha had. This level of ass-kicking would be well within [[Mary Sue]] territory for practically anyone else, but Sanguinius is the one Primarch who could both realistically pull it off due to his skill and the fact that he's got the Red (Thirst) Hulk mode, which he ultimately utilized while ripping Angron's head apart. He's also the one top-tier loyalist Primarch who isn't a douche (aka he's not Russ or the Lion), which also helps. Having seen this, the rest of the Chaos force went [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FjWe31S_0g fuck this shit I'm out] and ran, while the Loyalists were able to safely close the Eternity Gate.

But this is Warhammer 40,000, so by its very nature, [[noblebright]] is always surrounded by a sea of [[grimdark]], even when it's badass noblebright, and the [[Siege of Terra]] ranks up there as among the most grimdark events of the entire franchise. Eventually, Big-E himself, Sanguinius, [[Rogal Dorn]], Rogal Dorn's mustache, and a contingent of their respective Marines and Custodes launched a last-ditch assault against Horus, teleporting aboard his [[Vengeful Spirit|flagship]] and taking the fight to the Warmaster himself. As fighting broke out across the capital ship, Sanguinius got cut off from the rest of the assault party, and when he found Horus, he was alone. Horus, perhaps out of some small, lingering sense of affection for Sanguinius, offered his once most beloved brother, for the final time, a chance to turn to Chaos. But Sanguinius said '''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEhDjz0WAZs"NEVAH!"]''' and the two Primarchs proceeded to battle for the fate of mankind. Though Sanguinius was one of the most powerful of the Primarchs, he was wounded and wearied from the fight on Terra and already at a disadvantage, and Horus had been granted terrible power by the gods of Chaos to boot (terrible indeed, because he apparently wasn't as good at warp poker as the EMPRAH and batshit insane by then. He even called one of his sons Maloghurst at some point as recently revealed in "Saturnine"). Horus therefore slew Sanguinius so hard that it psychically traumatized the Blood Angels for ages to come, and the [[Black Rage]] became the ([[Mephiston|almost]]) inescapable mental scourge it is on the chapter today.