Warhammer 40K’s Dark Angels are enjoying a golden age of new lore

polygon.com:

The galaxy of Warhammer 40,000moves at a glacial pace, with major narrative threads frozen in place for years, sometimes even decades at a time. That’s been true of one of the game’s most popular factions, the green-armored Dark Angels Space Marines, basically since they were introduced to the game in the 1980s. But in March 2023, Lion El’Jonson, the long-lost leader of the Dark Angels, returned from the dead. His reappearance in the Imperium of Mankind is now making waves inside the First Legion, as it’s known, for the first time in 10,000 years. And it could be a prelude to something even more divisive to come.

Each Space Marine chapter was created from a Primarch, one of the Emperor’s genetically engineered sons. In the beginning there were only 20 Primarchs, and over 10 millenia they’ve been winnowed down — killed, lost, gone missing, or turned into slavering demons by the forces of Chaos. For a long while now the only Primarch left standing was Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines chapter and administrator extraordinaire. In the game’s modern canon, he has taken up leadership of the Imperium, the 40K universe’s de facto main character, which leaves him in the wildly unenviable position of both doing all of the paperwork for a star-spanning empire and mitigating the inevitable decline of that same star-spanning empire as it has descended into religious fanaticism.

For the last decade or so, the schtick about El’Jonson was that he was secretly entombed within the Dark Angels’ fortress monastery, known as The Rock, not dead but merely asleep. Then last year he mysteriously woke up, arriving in the nick of time as described in the campaign book Arks of Omen: The Lionto pull the entire Dark Angels’ chapters’ collective bacon out of the fire. Lion El’Jonson is not a politician, and he’s certainly not here to do paperwork. His stand-alone novel, The Lion: Son of the Forest; the aforementioned campaign book; and the new Codex Supplement: Dark Angels, when