Asmodai

Asmodai is the most senior and most successful Interrogator-Chaplain the Dark Angels possess, the foremost authority on the capture, imprisonment and confession of the Fallen. His is a grim vocation even by the standards of his tormented Chapter, for it falls to him to break the will of captured traitors and to force from their lips the repentance that the Unforgiven believe may yet save a damned soul. In this labour he has toiled longer than almost any brother alive.

To his terrible work Asmodai brings a device known as the Blades of Reason, an ancient instrument of torture bristling with honed and gleaming edges. Its blades are graven with scriptures of repentance in the old tongue of Caliban, and its head is threaded with fine neural wires, a cruel science that amplifies agony beyond any mortal endurance. With this weapon he strives to save his prisoners even as he tortures them, convinced that the salvation of the soul is worth any suffering of the flesh.

His zeal is boundless and unbending, and it has more than once brought him into conflict with the Inner Circle he serves. Supreme Grand Master Azrael himself has censured Asmodai on numerous occasions and been forced to act swiftly to contain the consequences of his fervour, for the Interrogator-Chaplain will let nothing, not diplomacy nor the Chapter's careful secrecy, stand between him and a confession. To many battle-brothers he is a figure to be feared as much as revered.

For all his ferocity, results come slowly in so merciless a calling. Across a career of extraordinary length Asmodai is said to have wrung true repentance from only a handful of the Fallen, his first triumph coming after eighteen days of unceasing torment broke a traitor at last. Yet he counts each such victory a soul reclaimed for the Emperor, and he pursues the rest with the same cold, implacable hatred, a living reminder that the Dark Angels forgive nothing and forget nothing.