The Angel
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This article is about the Weapon; for the Primarch of the Blood Angels, see Sanguinius. |
The Angel, also called the Sleeper and the Angel of Destruction, was an incredibly powerful living weapon, created on Terra by the Emperor himself.[1a]
Description
The Angel was "twice as tall as a man" (so 110-544 cm tall, using the shortest and tallest men ever recorded), with mighty wings on its back, and glowing with a halo of energy. It carried a massive flaming sword and left a trail of blue fire wherever it went. It was capable of laying waste to cities and armies in seconds. While physical attacks could slow it down or stun it, they could not truly harm it. It was completely immune to psychic attack, with any attempts to attack it resulting in the psyker suffering psychic backlash.[1b]
History
The Angel was created to destroy the Emperor's enemies on Terra during its pacification. Chief among those was the Daemon Prince Pharaa'gueotla, an ancient daemon that had terrorized Terra since the dawn of Mankind. Pharaa'gueotla was finally cast out by the arrival of the Emperor himself, and fled from Terra soon after. The Emperor eventually cornered the daemon on the planet later known as Karis Cephalon. The Emperor, with the help of the mighty Angel, imprisoned the daemon in the very bedrock of the planet.[1c]
Though a useful weapon, as shown with the defeat of Pharaa'gueotla, the Angel was flawed and would often cause more harm than good. One incident written in ancient tomes described a city named Coranis, reduced to ashes by the Angel. Judging the population unworthy of the Emperor's love, it wiped out the entire population of Caranis in a single night of bloodshed. From there, it moved out and destroyed the rest of the planet Coranis resided on, until it was emptied of all life. In order to quell the Angel's thirst for vengeance and cause it to fall into a slumber, the Emperor placed a piece of the corrupted flesh of the Daemon Prince Pharaa'gueotla into its coffin. The Angel returned to its coffin in order to destroy the flesh, allowing the Emperor to activate the locks and wards on its coffin, sealing it once again.[1d]
Though believed to be one of the Emperor's greatest weapons against Chaos, this flawed thirst for vengeance caused the Emperor to send the Angel back to Terra. Slated to be destroyed, the Angel was somehow smuggled out of the Sol system before the Emperor could dispose of it.[1a] Its location was unknown for millennia, though recently it was thought to be somewhere on the planet Karis Cephalon.
Millennia later, the Daemon Prince Pharaa'gueotla was freed through the actions of the misguided Radical Inquisitor Lichtenstein. The Inquisitor freed a fragment of the daemon's consciousnesses from its prison in the hope that it would help him locate the thrice-damned Librarium Hereticus. Instead, the daemon tricked the Inquisitor into almost opening a gate to the warp that would have freed the daemon. Its plan would have succeeded if not for the intervention of Inquisitor Kessel. Thought destroyed after it attempted to free itself again by possessing a psyker, the daemon began to roam the planet of Karis Cephalon, looking for another host body.[1c] Eventually, it located a suitable host, Cardinal Kodazcka. Using the followers it had gathered to its side, it had the Cardinal kidnapped. Following a daemonic ritual, the daemon possessed the body of the Cardinal and began laying waste to the city of Cephalon.[1g]
Deciding the only way to stop the Daemon Prince was to use the very weapon that had defeated it millennia earlier, Inquisition agents were sent to find the Angel. Learning the information they sought was located in ancient tomes, the agents searched the Cephalon Institute of Ecclesiastical Antiquities. Finding tomes secreted in the Institute thousands of years ago, they learned how to awaken the Angel as well as how to imprison it again.[1d] Armed with this knowledge, the agents searched for the location of the Angel. With luck they found that it had been hidden in Cephalon itself, deep in the ruins of the Amethyst Palace, in a glowing stasis-coffin.
After locating the coffin, a battle erupted between the Radical and Puritan factions of Inquisitorial agents about who should possess the Angel. During the battle, Pharaa'gueotla arrived to destroy its ancient enemy and the one thing capable of defeating it. Working quickly, the agents freed the Angel from its coffin so that it could battle the Daemon Prince. The two ancient enemies clashed in a mighty battle that left massive craters wherever one of the combatants fell. Eventually, the Angel was triumphant, driving its sword through the body of the daemon. Rising into the air, the Angel hurled the defeated Daemon Prince to the ground.[1b]
Soon after, though, the Angel turned on the Inquisition agents. Millennia of imprisonment and a fatal flaw in its creation had led the Angel to become more than was ever conceived. Far from being the champion of Mankind as the Emperor intended, it had come to the conclusion that all humans would eventually turn to Chaos, and that it would be better that they all be exterminated before that happened. Using knowledge gained from reading the ancient tomes, the agents quickly seized the remains of the daemon and placed them into the Angel's coffin. The Angel immediately flew to the coffin to destroy the daemon's remains. As it did so, the agents sealed the coffin and once more the Angel slept.[1e] Soon afterward, Inquisitorial troopers led by senior Inquisitor Lords, among them Lord Vertian, arrived to secure the Angel and take it into Inquisition hands.[1f]
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