Black Templar Marine Standing in a Grey Wasteland — Print & Oil Painting

Grey on grey on grey. The ground is grey, the sky is a pale unbroken grey, the armour is black going to charcoal, and the only colours allowed anywhere are two red eye lenses, a red rune on the tabard and a few seals of red wax. It is very nearly a black and white photograph with three pinpricks of blood left in it.

He stands full length and dead centre, feet apart, filling the frame from the bottom edge to well past the middle. The plate is the heavy pattern: shoulders like doors, bone-white caps on both pauldrons with a black cross laid across each, an ornate silver device at the throat, a broad belt hung with a bronze buckle and pouches.

The left hand carries a bolter with a stubby barrel and a box magazine. The right holds a chainsword the length of a man across the body at waist height, its teeth drawn individually along the whole spine of the blade. A white tabard falls between the legs, marked with the cross again and one red rune, and small parchments hang from the thigh plates on short chains.

The horizon is empty. No architecture, no wreckage, no enemy, nothing but a low band of darker ground and a haze where the two meet. Whatever happened here has finished happening.

One fact about this Chapter explains a good deal of the silence in the picture: they take no psykers. Where other Chapters field Librarians who read the warp and use what they find there, the Black Templars will not have one among them at any price, and they are known across the Imperium for the refusal. It sits in our Warhammer 40.000 collection, next to a brother of the Chapter firing amid falling snow.