Editing Sanguinius (section)

===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.