Blood Angels Librarian

[Taz]

Allow me to introduce Epistolary Arterion, The Burning Angel, hero of Temmestis IV.

 

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This veteran Librarian's roll of honor stretches back over 200 years. Taken from one of the smaller periphery tribes on Baal Secundus, his latent psychic abilities were detected early on. Even before his acceptance into the hallowed ranks of the sons of Sanguinius, Arterion displayed significant psychic talents. His fellow tribesmen had talked of burning him as a witch or leaving him to the mercy of the desert, but none would lay hands on him to try for fear of retaliation. So they settled for tolerating him, but he was generally shunned and left alone to fend for himself. This gave him a deep sense of self-reliance, which aided him in his trials at Angel's Fall as well as on his path as a Librarian.

 

After passing through his initial screening, he was earmarked as one of the Librarius' most promising students and even studied under Mephiston himself. Upon reaching the rank of Codicier he was attached to the Blood Angels' 4th Company where he was present during the Khartas incident, where he rescued a squad of battle-brothers by provoking the wrath of Ka'Bandha as he was about to lay waste to them, distracting the daemon for enough crucial moments to allow the squad to escape. He survived through the timely intervention of the Sanguinor onto the field.

 

He was awarded his title by Dante himself after his conduct in the Temmestis system in 881.M41. Arterion's first command, a battlegroup comprised mainly of 4th Company elements were deployed to the system to answer a distress call coming from the fourth planet, a verdant agri-world that supplied the adjacent Formund system, which housed a mid-size forge world. Temmestis IV was under attack from Tau forces when they had refused to join the xenos' Empire, and they did not have the forces to repel the invaders. While the world and system themselves were relatively isolated, and Temmestis IV exported little besides it's tithe to Formund, Dante in his tactical brilliance saw the makings of a Tau invasion of the galactic north, including the Ghoul Stars and further still, Baal herself, with Temmestis and eventually Formund as bridgeheads.

 

Initially the fighting was fierce. The combination of the xenos' stealth technology and tall agri-fields allowed the xenos to launch crippling hit-and-run attacks and slip away without reprisal and because of the damage it would do to the planet's infrastructure, Arterion was loathe to burn the fields and take the advantage from the aliens. Instead, he led his forces back out into he fields, using his psychic abilities he sensed the minds of the Tau stealth suit squads to counterattack the aliens before they could get into position for the ambush.

 

Despite his refusal to burn the fields wholesale, the harvest season meant that almost any skirmish in the fields invariably led to smaller fires. It was during a rescue of a unit of beleaguered PDF had lit up one such conflagration, Arterion and his squad used the fire to flank the aliens, bursting through the wall of flame, aetheric wings carrying him into the Tau's midst in moments. Word amongst the soldiers spread and soon the "Burning Angel" had become a figurehead for the strained human soldiery.

 

Using a frequency code he ripped from the mind of a stealth suit commander during a skirmish, he and the battlegroup's techmarines uploaded the code into the Imperial force's auspex units and allowed them to turn the tables on the xenos stealth suits, as well as jam the Tau in return. Jamming the alien's sentient auspexes, Arterion led a series of brutal assaults on Tau positions. The aliens responded with counterattacks using crisis suits. As the battlegroup closed in on the Tau's main fortification word spread from the battlegroup's scouts that the Tau were massing infantry as well as crisis suits. There were also sightings of one of the Tau demagogues, the Ethereals, leading the xenos forces from the front. Broadside-class crisis suits patrolled the border preventing the Blood Angels from bringing their armor in. Using his psychic powers he dropped from high-flying stormravens with his assault squads, bringing down the broadside suits and allowing the Predators and Rhinos to roll up unopposed. The Tau were crushed and Arterion himself took the head of the Ethereal commander cleanly ended the xenos' galactic invasion before it could truly start.

 

After wiping the rest of the Tau forces from the face of Temestis IV, Arterion's battlesgroup returned to Baal where he was hailed as the "Hero of Temmestis IV" and awarded with a special helmet worn in the pre-Heresy era by the hero Khitas Frome. In commemoration of his first command, he had the Chapter artificers modify the helmet with a psychic hood and engrave flames onto his armor.

 

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I was really pleased with how this model turned out, particularly the helmet and flames. C&C welcome! :lol:

[MagicMan]

Nice!

 

 

The free-handed fire effects are especially cool.

[Cpt_Reaper]

where on earth did you get that helmet? If you say you made it I shall most likely have to remove my jaw from the floor.

[Taz]

where on earth did you get that helmet? If you say you made it I shall most likely have to remove my jaw from the floor.

 

Not entirely. ^^' The helmet itself is from a set of 5 greco-roman style heads from maxmini.eu that my friend mega_marines had after making a scratchbuilt Sanguinor that's around this forum somewhere. Originally it came with two rather silly looking horsehair crests that looked a tad like bunny ears. I trimmed off the bunny ears, and made the psychic hood with greenstuff and some twine I took out of a disposable pipe cleaner (Which are now, by the way, my go-to materiel for making industrial size-looking wiring as it's much thinner than paperclips and bends and poses much easier.) I was originally going to try a classic, over-the-head psychic hood out of a shoulder pad, but four sliced-too-much shoulder pads and two ruined torso back halves later I decided putting it right on the helmet would make things a little easier.

[Phosis]

Nice

 

FOR SPARTA

[Taz]

It IS kind of Spartan, huh? ^^

[tyrannosaurus]

Great mini, loved the fluff - only suggestion I can make is that the red on the wings looks a little flat, maybe a wash and some highlights? Love it though, the helmet especially is sweet.

[Taz]

Either my camera didn't pick it up or I actually may have over-washed the wings. They were originally primed white with repeated red washes with a shining-burnished gold drybrush to highlight, and then another red wash. I'll have to go easier on the Baal Red.