Endryd Haar and the Blackshields: The Lost Sons of the Age of Darkness
“In the long dusk of the Imperium’s greatest war, there walked those who bore no name, no heraldry, and no master. They fought not for honour, nor obedience, but because war had become the only truth left to them.”
— Fragment recovered from the Canticles of Iron, M31.
Among the manifold tragedies of the Horus Heresy, few figures embody the path of the forsaken more completely than Endryd Haar, once a Praetor of the World Eaters Legion and known to the annals of Terra as the Riven Hound. Where his primarch embraced the chain and the nail, Haar cast both aside. He saw the Legion’s descent not as glory, but as sickness, and turned from it in defiance of gene and fate alike.
In time, he would gather others of like mind — oathbreakers, survivors, and the dispossessed — into a brotherhood without sigil or heraldry. They became known only as Blackshields, their armour stripped of colour, their origins erased. To the loyalist Imperium they were ghosts; to the Traitor hosts, heretics beyond redemption. Yet in the shadow between those absolutes, they endured — an army of the unclaimed, fighting for a redemption that would never come.
In the newly issued treatise Shattered Legions & Blackshields, these warbands are granted voice once more. Within its pages lie the Oaths that bind them, the means by which their fractured brotherhoods find form — whether by penance, vengeance, or the simple need to survive in a galaxy that no longer knows them.
Recovered Vox-Record, Ardun IX
No banners. No sigils. Only black. They came through the dust storms without words, moving as one. The commander’s voice was hoarse, stripped bare by long war.
“We are what remains. And what remains will not break.”
— Terminal record ends. Authorship unknown.
In my own studies of the Age of Darkness, I have found the Blackshields to be among the most compelling subjects for the painter and the storyteller alike. Their tragedy lies not in defeat, but in endurance — that they fought on when all purpose had turned to ash.
For those who would explore this further, the Blackshield Tutorials on my Patreon delve into the practice of rendering the lost and the broken: weathering techniques, palette design, and the subtle art of narrative painting.
In this, we honour them — the unremembered, the oath-bound, the forgotten sons of a dying age.
We are what remains. And what remains will not break.
Blackshields PDF Download
