Every so often, Forge World produces a miniature that feels like it remembers something the rest of us have forgotten. Aster Crohne is one of those rare models — a fragment of an older vision, caught between myth and history. He isn’t just a Blood Angel; he’s a relic of the Revenant Legion — what the IXth once were before Sanguinius remade them.
Before the Angel’s reforms, the IXth were brutal, pallid warriors, known for their hunger and savagery. They weren’t artists or poets. They were carrion sons — revenants who turned their curse into a weapon. When Sanguinius took command, he gave them new purpose, but warriors like Crohne carried the old blood forward, wearing nobility as armour over instinct.
The miniature captures that duality perfectly. The sculpt’s elegance hides a quiet violence — the relaxed grip on the sword, the restrained pose that still hints at a predator’s patience. This is not a flawless champion of Baal; this is an old killer learning how to be beautiful again. Forge World got it right — the proportions, the face, the sense of weight all mirror the tone of the artwork.
Painting Crohne feels like a meditation on restraint. The armour isn’t the bright, clean red of the Great Crusade — it’s darker, older, edged with violet undertones. Think of red wine dried on stone. The gold trim carries the faint green of oxidised metal, grounding the miniature in time and memory. The skin, pale and almost translucent, ties him back to the Revenant’s origins — the pallor of one who’s seen too much of death and refused to join it.
There’s tragedy here. You can sense that Crohne is a survivor of a Legion that doesn’t exist anymore. He’s the ghost of a past the IXth never speak of — a reminder that beauty, for them, was built on the bones of horror.
