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Moritat was an unofficial designation given to certain Space Marines of the ancient Legiones Astartes, who displayed suicidal urges and a blatant disregard for overall combat doctrine.

Operating independently on the battlefield, these individuals were often employed as efficient shock assault troops and tactical assassins.

From its earliest days, the Raven Guard Legion employed more Moritats than did many others.

The individuals assigned to this duty were often those considered extreme in their methods even by the cold-blooded Xeric, the original Terran techno-barbarian tribesmen who had composed the XIXth Legion at the First Founding, and they were often used -- willingly -- to undertake missions from which they were not expected to return.

Amongst the Raven Guard and the Terran-born XIXth Legion that preceded them, there was a tendency amongst combat veterans placed in situations of extreme stress to forsake all pretence of self-preservation, fighting with a terrifying, silent determination and the sole aim of causing as many casualties and as much destruction as possible before succumbing to their foe.

This strange blood-soaked ennui that drove many amongst the Raven Guard to sacrifice themselves in battle was known among the Terran members of the XIXth Legion as becoming "Ash Blind", while the later Raven Guard Astartes native to the world of Deliverance knew it as the "Sable Brand," a condition heralded by the darkening of the entire eye to black.

Those warriors who survived their suicidal furies sometimes recovered, their brethren never mentioning the incident in a typically Raven Guard display of reticence, but more often these Astartes were evermore plagued in combat by the urge to slay until death took them, paying no heed to tactical plans.

Raven Guard Moritat Ordias during the Horus Heresy.

The XIXth Legion, in the days before its primarch Corvus Corax's return, made little attempt to organise the Ash Blind on the battlefield, relying on the flexible nature of their tactical doctrines to make the maximum use of their suicidal urges when they took hold.

The Raven Lord later turned this aberrant effect of his gene-seed into a valuable weapon in his tactical arsenal, forming those afflicted by the Sable Brand into units of Shadow Killers and employing them as shock assault troops and assassins.

It was the employment of such unconventional troop-types that allowed Corax to best his brother Roboute Guilliman in several of his brother-primarch's notoriously testing strategio-simulacra, an unexpected tactic that the lord of the Ultramarines had never faced before but was quick to adopt into the Legiones Astartes order of battle, creating the "Moritat" designation and role as it was later known amongst the rest of the Legions.

Moritat-Prime Kaedes Nex - A dark figure of gruesome repute amongst the tightly knit survivors of Deliverance, Kaedes was seen as an ill-omen by his brothers. On Kiavahr in his youth he was known as the "Blood Crow," an infamous murderer condemned to rot on the prison moon that would become Deliverance. There he remained, until Corvus Corax offered him freedom and a pardon if he fought alongside the other rebels and limited his targets to those chosen by his new master. After enduring the painful late transformation to a Space Marine, it was only by the continued favour shown to him by Corax that he remained within the ranks of the Raven Guard, with few of his brothers willing to tolerate his macabre obsession with the hunt. Yet, in the grim shadow wars fought by the Raven Guard in furtherance of the Emperor's grand plan, his murder-honed skills were employed with grim regularity. When the Raven Guard came to Isstvan V, Kaedes came with them, vanishing into the wastes to stalk the Traitors on his own terms. Nothing is recorded of his role in either the retreat from the Drop Site Massacre or the days that followed, and some maintain that not all of the Traitor craft to later leave Isstvan V carried only the followers of Horus, and that Kaedes continued his private war in the shadows of the Horus Heresy amongst the ranks of his enemies.

XIXth Legion Assault Veteran Sgt with Moritat