The Roboutian Heresy

by Zahariel

Inspired by the great Dornian Heresy of Aurelius Rex, here is an alternate timeline to the Warhammer 40000 universe, where Guilliman turned traitor instead of Horus, and led half the Legions in rebellion against the Emperor. The Index Astartes are done for all Legions. Now, the Times of Ending have begun ...

10. Index Astartes : Iron Hands

I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.

---

Index Astartes – Iron Hands : The Corroded Souls

Among all those lost to the Dark Gods, it is the Tenth Legion's sons who most clearly bear the mark of their corruption upon their bodies. Their flesh is ravaged by disease, and their minds twisted to the dark designs of the Father of Plague. Them who once scorned the weakness of mortal flesh are now slaves to their own corruption, everything around them corroding and falling apart in the wake of their ruinous aura. Pain is their companion in every moment of their tortured existences, until at least they earn the final blessing of their dark patron and succumb to the unholy plagues running through their blood – only to rise again as the infamous Plague Marines, rightfully feared by all servants of the God-Emperor. Yet in spite of all the countless horrors they have wrought, their fate is perhaps the most tragic of all the Traitor Legions. For deep within the Eye of Terror, it is said that Ferrus Manus still weep for the betrayal that brought him and his sons to this point, his silver hands haunting him with the memory of his failures and sins.

Origins

The planet known in Inquisitorial records as Medusa is located in the Segmentum Obscurus, not far from the Eye of Terror. Its size is enormous, its sky constantly shrouded in blackness and its air cold, yet it remains possible for unaugmented and unprotected humans to walk its surface. A man could walk for centuries on the endless barren plains of Medusa without crossing his own trail. Were it not for the Inquisitorial outposts keeping a constant watch upon it, there would be nothing about the planet indicating its dreadful past, and the horrors that it birthed.

When Mankind first left its cradle to spread out among the stars in the Stellar Exodus, not all the migrant fleets that scattered across the galaxy were equal. Many were refugees, seeking to escape the terrible wars that even then raged upon Terra. Others were ideological groups who wanted to create their own vision of utopia on distant worlds. These had to use whatever vessels they could find, and many were lost to the tides of the Warp, in these days before the light of the Astronomican illuminated the galaxy. Even those who reached their destination generally lost most of the technology they had brought with them in a few decades, reverting to medieval lifestyles. Out of a hundred colony ships leaving Terra, only a few managed to actually build stable, space-faring societies on their new homeworlds. Medusa, however, has a unique story among the worlds seeded by Humanity during the Exodus.

In the annals of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it is written that Medusa was first located in the galactic heavens by the precursors of the order. Its rich mineral resources made it a very tempting prize, and a fleet of sleeper ships was assembled to colonize it. These vessels used primitive Warp technology, without the advantage of Navigators to lead them. Instead, they relied on much slower engines, requiring the colonists to be put into stasis for the countless centuries that the journey would take. During this time, the ships were maintained and the colonists cared for by automated drones. Though several ships were lost during the journey, most of them reached their destination, and their passengers quickly turned the newly christened Medusa into a very efficient station of mining and construction.

The Telstarax

The most obvious remnant of Medusa's glorious past, the Telstarax was a gigantic orbital ring-station circling the entire planet. During the planet's golden age, with most of Medusa's surface being improper to human habitation, it was from the Telstarax that the mining of the planet's resources and the manufacturing of the many products the colonists traded with neighbouring human systems were taking place. Built as it was to surround an already gigantic planet, the station was possibly the greatest such construction ever realized by Mankind, a true testament to the species' ingenuity. It is estimated that hundreds of millions of humans could live within it, and that thousands of ships could anchor at its docks. Great hydroponic farms and moisture recyclers fed the population, which was separated in several city-blocks alongside the ring's circumference.

By the time the Imperium reached Medusa, however, the Telstarax was in ruins, brought low by the very catastrophe which ended the planet's glory. Most of it had fallen to the ground, and the parts that still remained in orbit were a terrible hazard to space navigation near the planet. Not only did the remnants stand in the way of the ships, but ancient weapon arrays remained active, alimented by backup generators which had endured the passage of time with all the success of devices from the Dark Age of Technology. Some adepts of the Mechanicum attempted to board the ruins in orbit and explore them, driven by the lure of ancient technology. Very few of these teams ever returned, and none brought anything worth the great expense of assembling them. Nonetheless, there were still attempts until the Roboutian Heresy – some explorers even spent the entire civil war within the Telstarax, learning of what had transpired only when they emerged, near-starved and mostly mad.

However, this glory was not to last. Long before the Warp Storms of the Long Night engulfed the galaxy, a terrible cataclysm befelled Medusa. Its exact nature remains unknown – some Inquisitors think it was caused by rampant psyker mutation among the population, a frequent enough scenario in these days of impiety, while secretive scions of the Mechanicus whisper of even darker sins, refusing to explain the nature of the techno-heresies they are considering, though events that took place after the Heresy shed some light on the question. All that is known for certain is that by the time the Emperor revealed Himself on Terra and began His great work in unifying the Throneworld, Medusa was a wasteland, covered in the ruins of its past, filled with lost wonders and horrors. Its population had devolved into superstitious tribesmen, forced to live a nomadic existence by the planet's ever present seismic activity.

It was on this world that Ferrus Manus, tenth son of the Emperor of Mankind, arrived after the Dark Gods stole the Primarchs from their father and scattered them across the stars. Among his brothers, Ferrus was one of those whose preservation pod spent the longest into the Warp before it was spat out into realspace. Records indicate that the Primarch only arrived on Medusa barely two decades before the world was found by the forces of the Great Crusade, and that he emerged from his womb of metal fully grown, instead of as the infant most Primarchs were when they first set foot on their adoptive homeworlds.

He was wounded. His blood was falling on the dry earth, and though his wounds were healing, he could tell that the process was too slow, and he had already lost too much blood during the ascent to escape the pit at the bottom of which he had awoken. The silver wyrm that his coming had freed from its prison had hurt him badly, tearing away chunks of his flesh with its teeth before it had fled.

He had to find the creature, to stop it before it did more harm. He knew, without knowing why, that there would be others nearby – others who lacked his strength and resilience. They would be easy prey for the wyrm. If he didn't find the creature quickly, then … His coming on this world had unleashed the beast : anything it did would be his direct fault.

But he was too weak. His vision swam with pain, and he staggered, before crashing down upon the ground. Unconsciousness began to swallow him, and though he resisted it with every iota of his will as he kept moving, crawling forward along the wyrm's tracks, he couldn't endure very long the betrayal of his flesh.

His last thought before the darkness of unwanted slumber claimed him was that he had failed. Because of his weakness, who knew what would happen that he could have prevented.

Soon, the Primarch came in contact with the nomadic tribes of Medusa. To these primitive people, he was a figure straight out of their myths and legends : a giant of a man, his hands glimmering with metal from unknown origin. It was because of these hands that he first took the name of Ferrus Manus, which literally means 'hand of iron' in High Gothic. His true name – the one planned for him by the God-Emperor when he was still a foetus hidden deep in the Master of Mankind's genetic laboratories – is a mystery : only the Emperor Himself knows it, and perhaps Ferrus as well.

Ferrus never settled down in any particular tribe : instead, he wandered across the entire planet, leaving tells of his deeds in his wake. He fought many of the ancient creatures of Medusa, freeing the tribes from the constant fear that had haunted them for generations. In time, these tribes came to him, asking for him to lead them. Although Ferrus was reticent, he finally accepted, and ushered in a new age of peace across the planet. While the tribes no longer warred between themselves, however, there were still many threats left : the ghosts of Medusa's past were stirring from their long slumber, awakened by the arrival of the Primarch. Many Medusans were lost to erring horrors, and many more to the crusades that were fought to secure enough land for the tribes to settle.

On the few spots were the ground was stable, Ferrus Manus ordered cities to be built so that his people could seek shelter behind their walls. The time of their construction was a harsh one, for the immobile tribes were exposed, and Ferrus had to force them to work beyond their limits to finish the walls before they were pushed to extinction by the mechanical abominations stalking the desert plains of Medusa. The great armored crawlers into which the tribes had journeyed across the planet for many centuries were turned into excavation machines, and with the intellect of Ferrus commanding the construction of the fortifications, it only took a few years for the cities to be completed – but these were gruelling years, which were remembered by the people of Medusa as the Time of Trials.

Another beast fell as he tore its bulbous head off. This one had clearly been designed for battle by whatever ancient savant had created it : its long, sinuous body was covered in thorns of metal that could – and had – gut a man simply by passing too near.

He cast the machine's inanimate form away before turning to the workers who had suffered the creature's assaults every night for three months. He could see the awe in their gaze, but also the bitterness : if it was so easy for him to destroy the monster of their nightmares, why had it taken him so long ? They did not know that he had only learned of the beast's presence two weeks ago, when an exhausted messenger had finally found him. He had come here as fast as he could, but they didn't care about that : all they knew was that many of their friends were dead and that he had not been here to protect them.

He had no words to console them. Anything he said would only be hypocrisy, for it had been at his command that they had stopped to run and hide and had stood their ground as they built the cities : he was to blame for their loss. Furthermore, although none of them knew, it was also because of him that the cities were necessary in the first place. Even if he had no proof, he knew in his guts that his arrival had somehow caused the unrest in the great ruins, where more constructs awoke from their long slumber with every season.

He turned his back to the workers without a word nor a change in his expression, and walked away. There was much to be done.

The rigours of the Time of Trials changed the Medusans, making them value strength and self-reliance more than the communitarian attitude they had previously embraced to survive. From their infancy, Medusans were tested, with the strongest alone allowed to rise above their peers, and the weak and infirm often abandoned to the wild lands – safe for those who displayed skill in the arts of the machine. Most of the population of Medusa now lived in the seven cities built during the Time of Trials, but there were several tribes who continued their nomadic existence, either because they chose to or because Ferrus had judged them unworthy of taking up space and resources in his cities.

Indeed, Ferrus Manus only valued those who could best serve his vision of a united, prosperous world, and he had no qualm in abandoning those he deemed useless to his great work. Sacrifices, he taught the population of the world, were inevitable on the road of progress, and while they should not be glorified, they shouldn't be unduly mourned either. Some of the weak had to perish so that the strong may keep protecting the rest : such was the philosophy of Ferrus Manus. Today still, many Inquisitors adopt similar lines of thought, as it is one of the few ways for the human mind to cope with the inhuman sacrifices demanded of one in such a line of duty.

The Gorgon, as he came to be known to his people during his days of rulership, was intransigent in his judgements, but he was also fair and rewarded well those who served to his exacting standards. So it was that when the Great Crusade found Medusa, a mere decade after the end of the Time of Trials, it had become a relatively prosperous planet, with many of the lost secrets of the Age of Technology recovered from the ruins of the past.

The Mechanicum had an important presence in the Expeditionary Fleet which found Medusa, and the lords of the Machine Cult were overjoyed at the discovery. The rest of the fleet, however, was far more awed by the discovery of a Primarch : one of the sons of the new galactic empire. It was an honor to them, and those who met Ferrus Manus as the planet's sovereign immediately recognized him for what he was. Upon learning of the Imperium and of its master, as well as his apparent relationship with Him, Ferrus Manus pledged Medusa to the cause of the Great Crusade and left the world in the hands of his subordinates as he himself travelled to Terra to meet his father and learn more of his heritage.

The Great Crusade

Each step up the stairs was agony. He had thought himself strong, believed that he had purged himself of the weakness of flesh that had caused him to fail more than twenty years ago, but now he wasn't so certain he had succeeded. His very soul was being pushed down by the weight of … of what, exactly ?

The Astartes Tower was more than a simple building, that he had known from the moment he had first set eyes upon the structure. Each of the discovered Primarchs had climbed it at the end of his lessons, to swear his loyalty to the Emperor before taking command of the Legion wrought in his image. It was designed to test not just the physical fitness, but the strength of the spirit. A Primarch had to be strong both in body and soul, for they were to lead the Legions which would shape the future of all Mankind. Ferrus knew not what would happen should he fail the test – he had heard half-whispered rumors that it had happened before, but had faced only silence when he had investigated.

Finally, he stood at the top of the tower, and knelt before the throne upon which sat his father. There, he swore his oath of moment : a promise not to rest nor fail until the galaxy was brought to heel under the Pax Imperialis.

'You are the blade of my wrath,' said the Master of Mankind to the Primarch. 'You shall expunge the corruption that takes root in the hearts of weak men, so that Humanity can claim what is rightfully hers.'

'I shall,' vowed Ferrus. 'None shall escape my hand, and I will cleanse the galaxy in your name, father.'

'I know you will,' replied the Emperor with a smile that Ferrus couldn't tell whether it was proud or sad.

Like all Primarchs, Ferrus was gifted with a genius' intellect, and quickly absorbed the lore required of a Legion Master. He learned how to direct armed forces over a hundred battlefields at once, how to command fleets of dozens of ships in space battles, and – though he didn't take these lessons at heart – how to use diplomacy to convince peaceful human worlds to join the Imperium. He spent a lot of time in the great forge-cities of the Mechanicum on Mars, forging the first signs of the alliance between his Legion and the priests of the Machine-God.

Reunited with their Primarch, the warriors of the Tenth Legion abandoned the designation 'Storm Walkers', which had slowly begun to attach to them, and renamed themselves the Iron Hands in his honor. Prior to their Primarch's discovery, they had been one of the Legions favoured by the Imperial commanders when the presence of Astartes were required. Their tactical acumen and willingness to risk themselves to save the lives of their allies had enabled the conquest of many worlds, with the destruction of the Ork Empire of Seraphina being so far the most exemplar campaign in their rolls of honor.

Under Ferrus Manus' command, however, the Tenth Legion became a force of remorseless warriors, crushing anything that stood in their path with a cold brutality that unnerved many of their human allies. Possessing a natural affinity for heavy weapons and great engines of war, they annihilated resisting human cultures and xenos empires alike, showing no mercy to those who refused the light of the Emperor's rule. On more than one occasion the sons of Ferrus showed outright contempt for the humans fighting alongside them, regarding them as weak and unworthy of the galaxy they were conquering. This obsession with strength came from the Legion's roots, both on Medusa and on Terra : the Tenth Legion had always selected its aspirants from the youth of strong, proud warrior cultures. It was also encouraged by their Primarch, who personally believed that the Legions had to be strong in order to defend the realms of Mankind from the countless threats lurking between the stars.

'We are weapons. Instruments of death and destruction, harnessed to serve a greater ideal. Our purpose is to wage war in the Emperor's name; to conquer the galaxy and crush all who stand against us. Anything else is nothing more than self-delusion.'

Attributed to Ferrus Manus 'The Gorgon', Primarch of the Tenth Legion

In the ranks of the Iron Hands, weakness soon became the capital sin, for the weak threatened all those around them with their failures. On Medusa, the weak had been a burden on the tribes : in the Imperium, the weak threatened to ruin the ideals of the Great Crusade with their imperfections. Entire worlds were burned to the ground in the wake of the Iron Hands, their population put to the sword for their deviance – either genetic or ideological. These beliefs led many Iron Hands to embrace the augmetic technology spread across the Legion. While the other Legions used augmetics as prosthetics, replacements for body parts lost in war, the Iron Hands chose to replace viable, perfectly functional parts of themselves with mechanical equivalents, believing it made them stronger. Many chose to amputate their hands and replace them with augmetics, in imitation of their father's own silver hands.

This, and the Legion's tendency to field much more tanks and heavy weapons than other Legions, earned the sons of Ferrus the nickname of 'the Iron Tenth', which they bore with pride. Like most other Legions, the recruits of the Iron Hands began to come principally from the Primarch's homeworld, but the population of Medusa was too small to be a viable source of genetic diversity for the Legion. To counter this, Ferrus Manus declared that all human worlds conquered by his forces would pay a tithe of blood : upon achieving compliance, if the people's genetics were conform to the standards of the Tenth, a portion of their youths – both male and female – were taken away by the Legion. They were then brought to Medusa and added to its population, bringing fresh blood to the united clans. Many looked upon this practice with reprobation, and their unease was increased when rumours began to spread that these unwilling migrants were actually abandoned in the middle of the Medusan deserts, so that the techno-abominations dwelling there would winnow the weak and allow only the strong and cunning to reach the safety of the Seven Cities. Nothing was proven, however, until the time of Isstvan, when such concerns no longer mattered.

Among the brotherhood of the Primarchs, Ferrus Manus mostly stood alone, content to lead his Legion into its own battles, fighting alongside other Legions as dictated by the necessities of the Great Crusade but rarely seeing the need to truly bond with the other Primarchs. The exceptions were Fulgrim and Guilliman : he was close to both of them, and their Legions won some of the most contested battles of the Great Crusade fighting together. His bond with the Phoenician began during his sojourn on Terra, where Fulgrim was also present at the time. Though the exact details of their first meeting have long since passed into legend, it is said that the Primarch of the Third Legion descended into the great forges of the Emperor's Palace to find his Medusan brother there. The two of them entered a forging contest, and each produced a weapon of such perfection than both claimed the other had won the challenge. They exchanged weapons, Ferrus taking the warhammer Forgebreaker and Fulgrim the sword Fireblade, and the two Legions were close for the entirety of the Great Crusade. Fulgrim appreciated the pursuit of perfection through the elimination of weakness that the Iron Hands pursued, even if he wasn't certain it was necessary to take it that far. Meanwhile, the Iron Hands saw in the Emperor's Children kindred spirit, dedicated to bettering themselves to best serve the Emperor's purpose, even if the path they had chosen toward that similar end was different.

Ferrus and Guilliman's relationship is less documented, though many archivists have looked into it in the hope to find some clue as to whether this friendship had any relation to the reason why the Iron Hands later turned against the Imperium. The lord of Ultramar had a lot of respect for Ferrus' unyielding strength of character, while Ferrus admired what Guilliman had made of the Five Hundred Worlds – a realm of proud militaristic strength and culture, similar to what he had wanted to shape Medusa into before the Great Crusade called him to greater responsibilities.

When Horus was elevated to the rank of Warmaster, many expected Ferrus to feel jealous of the nomination, but the Gorgon cared nothing for titles and ranks among the Primarchs. He was master of the Tenth Legion, and that was already responsibility enough for him. He was more bitter about the Emperor's decision at Nikaea, for he had never accepted the integration of psykers within his Legion. Psychic power, he claimed, depended on fickle and unpredictable emotions, and couldn't be made a founding part of anything, let alone a galactic empire. Still, he bowed to the decision of the Master of Mankind, though he never got around creating an actual Librarius before the end of the Great Crusade.

Pandorax : Past Truths and Lies

After Nikaea, Ferrus returned to his campaign, within the Ultima Segmentum, accompanied by most of the Tenth Legion – a part of the Iron Hands was assigned to other Expeditionary Fleets. After several years of relative tranquil progress, with regular reports of the Legion's advance to the Warmaster and the rest of the Great Crusade's commanders, the Iron Hands claimed to have encountered an adversary posing them difficulties. Called the Diasporex, it was a gathering of hundreds of space ships living in a nomad community, using hydrogen collectors to aliment their vessels in fuel. This fleet was a mix of human vessels, crewed by the descendants of human worlds lost to the madness of Old Night, and various minor xenos breeds, all working together in the name of survival. Such a blatant affront to the ideals of the Great Crusade could not be tolerated, and after Ferrus' first offer to the humans to leave the Diasporex and join the Imperium was refused, the Tenth Legion decided to eradicate the whole conglomerate.

But the Diasporex commanders were expert in space navigation, and eluded the pursuit of the Iron Tenth for months, even managing to defeat the Astartes vessels in several engagements. Enraged by his continuous failures, Ferrus Manus sent an astropathic call for aid, judging that his own methods and resources weren't sufficient. He called for the one Primarch and Legion he trusted among the others : the Emperor's Children.

Fulgrim answered Ferrus' call, and the two Primarchs arranged to gather their fleet at the realspace equivalent of a nexus of Warp routes. However, when the fleet of the Third Legion arrived at the gathering point, the Iron Hands weren't there. Instead, after several weeks, they were attacked by a fleet of Dark Eldar vessels, their flagship gutted and their Primarch captured and dragged into the Webway. This would start the Bleeding War, where the soul of the Emperor's Children would be rewritten in blood and torment.

The Palace of Sensations shuddered with the wrath of its lord and master. The plans of the Lord of Pain and Pleasure had been denied – the sons of the Phoenix had refused the illumination He had offered them. The Laers had been cast into the Immaterium, their material forms wiped out from the galaxy. In His wrath, the Dark Prince had ordered them all tortured for one aeon for each soul that had been denied to Him by their failure. Their agonies would appease the loss, but only slightly. It would not do for Slaanesh not to have His own personal Legion in the days of upheaval to come. Fortunately, the Prince had another plan, another target for His desires. It would be even better, in some ways, for He would even get to enjoy the outrage it would cause to the brute sitting upon the Skull Throne. But the insult of the well-named Children of the Anathema would not be allowed to stand – His pride would not permit it.

His elder brother, Nurgle, had yet to secure his own Legion for the Great Game. Although the Lord of Pain found it distasteful to associate with the Grandfather, needs must.

The Sea of Souls heaved with the deals of Gods, and a pact was forged. The sons of the Gorgon would be muted and lost by the combined power of the two Dark Gods, cast into the embrace of Nurgle – while the unwilling servants of Slaanesh would be deceived into punishing those who had refused His benevolent rule over them.

Slaanesh laughed, and a thousand Neverborn were born of the sound, each as exquisite as it was horrible, as terrifying as it was seductive.

For many centuries, what happened to the Iron Hands between their last astropathic message to the Third Legion and their arrival in the Isstvan system has remained a mystery. It took that long to the Inquisition's highest echelons to piece together the truth of the Tenth Legion's fate, with assistance from the both the Alpha Legion and the Vanus Temple of the Officio Assassinorum. Even then, we only know the events as they occurred from the Iron Hands' point of view : how and why such things happened is known only the Dark Gods themselves.

On their way to the muster point, the fleet of the Iron Hands was entrapped within an extremely violent Warp Storm. Several ships, tens of thousands of crew and hundreds of Astartes were lost to the Sea of Souls by the time the fleet managed to emerge from the Warp, performing a desperate drop back in realspace that greatly damaged many more vessels. The Tenth Legion's main force found itself trapped within a system identified by the galactic maps as the Pandorax system. Information on the system was scarce, even in the great data-banks of the Iron Hands' flagship, the Fist of Iron. It appeared as if the data had been deliberately erased, with not even the information about how the system had been named in the first place available.

While the Legion serfs and Techmarines began the arduous process of repairing the damage done to the fleet, the astropaths attempted to contact other Imperial forces, especially the Emperor's Children, to tell them of what had happened. They found all their efforts thwarted : though the Iron Hands had escaped the turmoil of the Warp by returning to realspace, the Sea of Souls was still raging, and astropathic communication was impossible. However, in their attempts, the astropaths discovered that the source of the Warp perturbation was located on the system's only life-sustaining planet : a jungle-type deathworld named Pythos. Dozens of astropaths were lost trying to locate or analyse the source more precisely before Ferrus decreed that his Legion would descend upon the world and locate and destroy the source of the perturbation – even if they had to burn down the entire planet to do so.

From the moment the Iron Hands set foot on Pythos, they were beset on all sides. The planet had earned its qualification as a death world : great predatory beasts stalked the jungle, some of them capable of fighting against Titans. The jungle itself grew at an impossible rate, forcing the Astartes to burn the woods surrounding their bases simply to prevent them from being overgrown. Packs of saurian predators harassed their patrols, and the great beasts forced most of their heaviest weaponry to remain in position in order to defend their bases.

Using the senses of his astropaths, Ferrus attempted to triangulate the emplacement of the Warp anomaly's source. It was a long and arduous process, for the bound psykers were driven mad by their efforts, and even those who managed to get a reading could only yield estimations. Finally, however, a gunship reported to have found something that seemed like what the Tenth Legion was searching for. Ferrus himself led the expedition to the location, tearing a path through the jungle as he did so.

The source of the anomaly was a monolith of Warp matter, hundreds of meters high yet impossible to see from orbit. Its mere presence caused violent seizures among the psykers Ferrus had brought with him. Having seen the thing for himself, Ferrus transmitted its coordinates to his fleet, and ordered the vessels to prepare to fire at it with all of their might, while the ground forces prepared to evacuate the world. The Primarch had little doubt that the combined might of dozens of ships would have catastrophic consequences for the planet, but he cared little.

Just as the ships were aligning into position and the evacuation was about to begin before the bombardment, the monolith reacted to the impending threat. It pulsed with Warp energy, and an arc of unholy lightning arced between its top and one of the ships in orbit : the Veritas Ferrum, one of the Tenth Legion's greatest vessels. Its crew was consumed by the raw energy, and the ship itself was dragged toward the world, shielding the monolith from the rest of the fleet's guns.

'Our flesh is weak … Forgive me, my lord.'

Last words of Durun Atticus, Captain of the 111th Clan-company, before all contact was lost with the Veritas Ferrum

The crash of the Veritas Ferrum caused a cataclysm both physical and psychic, with the death of tens of thousands of serfs finally rupturing the barter between the Warp and reality. From the depths of the planet's caverns emerged a host of daemons and nightmares. From examining what little is known of this battle, the Imperium has deduced that the Neverborn were children of Nurgle, the Chaos God of Plague and Decay. They fell upon the Iron Hands, many possessing the lifeforms of Pythos while doing so. Taken completely by surprise, the Iron Hands lost hundreds of warriors during the conflict's first hours. Aggravating their peril was the absence of their Primarch, who had vanished in the first moments of the daemonic incursion.

The dead stared at him with empty sockets, accusation writ plain in their bones. They had died because of him. Because of his failure – because of his weakness. They silently judged him, from the present and the past alike, staring at him and knowing what he had done – and more importantly, what he had not done.

'No …' he groaned, fighting against the growing tide of despair.

He saw the ruin of Mankind in the dead's eyes. An empire of lies and oppression, too weak to defend itself from the threat of xenos life. He saw his great Legion broken, shattered into countless lesser reflections of itself.

'No !' he shouted in defiance, rising Forgebreaker high as he swept the warhammer around, forcing the dead back. 'This will not be !'

It took several hours before Ferrus Manus reappeared, taking command of his Legion once more, but even the command of a Primarch wasn't enough to turn things in the Astartes' favor. Without Librarians nor knowledge of the creatures of the Warp, the Iron Hands were unable to fight the Neverborn properly, and Ferrus ended up ordering his forces to abandon Pythos and leave the Pandorax system entirely. It is believed that at this point, the Primarch of the Iron Hands intended to warn the Imperium of the horrors he had witnessed, and return to the system with enough firepower and the proper knowledge – even if he had to shake it off Magnus himself – to purge it entirely. However, once his fleet left the zone of the Warp turbulences that prevented communication, his Legion discovered the parting gift of the daemons of Nurgle they had faced.

All Astartes enjoy the benefits of the Emperor's genius in many ways, and one of those is their enhanced immune system. As is the case with poisons – though these two gifts are the results of different organs – there are very few diseases that can affect a Space Marine. But the creatures of Pandorax had unleashed one such disease among the Iron Hands : the Warp-born plague now known to us as Nurgle's Rot. It ran through the ships of the Iron Hands, decimating their crews in a matter of days, and felling many Astartes as well. Astropaths and Navigators were sealed away from the infection behind great adamantium doors, locked forever with life-sustaining engines that could keep them alive as long as needed. Some of them, it is said, endure behind these gates still.

The warp-born disease was rotting the living flesh of the Iron Hands, and even affected their augmetics, corroding them and twisting their mechanisms into hideous amalgamations of decayed tissue and ruined metal. At the same time, visions started to haunt the dreams of the afflicted : vistas of plague and ruin, and of a bountiful garden that offered life and death in equal measure, locked into an eternal cycle of putrefaction under the loving eyes of an all-consuming god. The belief of the Iron Hands in the Imperial Truth, already shaken by what they had witnessed on Pythos, waned with each such nightmare.

As they struggled to understand the disease and find a way to cure themselves, the Iron Hands were found by Roboute Guilliman. Already walking the path of betrayal, the Primarch of the Ultramarines met his brother from behind a void-sealed sheet of plastiglass – at the demand of Ferrus, not his own. Guilliman told his brother that he knew the nature of what the Iron Hands had faced on Pythos, and that the Emperor had also known it for a long time, but that the Master of Mankind had kept it secret from His sons, despite the risks should they face these dangers without warning of their true nature.

Guilliman told the Gorgon that though he had learned much of the Empyrean's secrets, the Emperor alone held the secrets necessary to healing Ferrus and his sons. However, the Master of Mankind would never allow the Iron Hands to live now that they had witnessed the evidence of His lies. At the very least, all Astartes would be purged, and it was unlikely that Ferrus himself would be spared. Guilliman then offered another path : he told Ferrus that he and other Primarchs had long known of the Emperor's duplicity, and prepared to turn against Him and free Mankind of His tyranny and lies. With the help of Ferrus, Guilliman claimed, their rebellion would be unstoppable. The False Emperor would be deposed, and in His vaults Guilliman and Ferrus would find the way to save the Tenth Legion from the curse they suffered because of His lies.

It is not known if it was Guilliman's rhetoric, any long-hidden doubt on his part, or the curse running through his flesh that convinced Ferrus. But he accepted Guilliman's offer. The Iron Hands would stand with the Ultramarines and their allies in this new crusade – but first, they all must purge themselves of one last weakness. That purge would take place in the Isstvan system, where Roboute had long planned the beginning of his rebellion.

The Heresy

Four Legions gathered at Isstvan, claiming their goal was to bring down the rebel Imperial Governor put in place by the Raven Guard decades earlier. The Ultramarines, the Iron Hands, the Imperial Fists and the Blood Angels came with almost all of their numbers, bringing hundreds of thousands of Legionaries within the same system – a feat not seen since the Triumph of Ullanor. Many among the four Legions thought it to be overkill – the rebels couldn't possibly require such deployment of forces. They were quelled with lies that it was a show of force, to warn the rest of the Imperium that rebellion couldn't possibly succeed. The true purpose, of course, was much different.

Ferrus had summoned all of his Legion to Isstvan, forcing Clan-companies all across the Great Crusade to abandon their allies in the middle of their wars of compliance and attend their master. These warriors arrived at Isstvan concerned, wondering why their lord had acted so out of character – many Imperial live would be lost due to their absence. Their demand for an audience with the Gorgon, however, were refused – they weren't even allowed to meet with any of their brothers among the Primarch's force. Instead, they received their orders of battle for the battle of Isstvan III. Strangely, only they were sent on the planet – all the Iron Hands who had accompanied their lord to Pandorax were withhold aboard their ships. Those afflicted by the curse of Nurgle, it seems, all chose to follow their master in his betrayal of the Emperor.

In the battle against the Isstvanian rebels, the Iron Hands were tasked with the outskirts of the great city, where the rebels had massed their tanks and heavy ordnance. As such, when the true purpose of the war was revealed in all its horror, they were the farthest to any form of shelter from the virus bombing. It is estimated that about ten thousand Iron Hands were lost in the Isstvan Atrocity. Some of them may have survived the initial bombardment and the deluge of fire that followed, but if there were any, these tenacious souls were wiped out by the following war opposing the loyalist survivors to their traitorous kind. In the few annals we have of this terrible battle, nowhere is it made mention of any Iron Hand fighting on the side of the Emperor's faithful. Ferrus, in a show of ruthless tactical cunning typical of the Gorgon, chose well where to send those of his sons he wanted to kill.

When the true scope of Guilliman's betrayal was uncovered on the killing fields of Isstvan V, the Iron Hands were at the vanguard of the renegades' assault. It was them who drew most of the loyalists' first wave, using their numbers and enhanced resilience to endure the blow. To their own surprise, they saw that they had another advantage over their former brothers : the disease that afflicted them had made them almost impervious to pain, and enabled their bodies to sustain much more punishment than before.

Even Ferrus himself saw the advantages of his new form when he faced the King of the Night in single combat. Faced with his brothers' betrayal, Konrad Curze's rage was limitless, his potential as a Primarch unbound : Ferrus, who would have been the match of any of his brothers before, was only able to survive the duel because of his new abilities. Konrad spent most of the duel asking his fallen brother not what had happened to him, for he could see plainly the corruption of the Iron Hands, but what had become of the Emperor's Children, who had come to reinforce the Tenth Legion before vanishing from the galaxy. Ferrus didn't answer to any of his enraged brother's question, which isn't surprising, since he himself knew nothing of Fulgrim's fate. Even Guilliman ignored what had become of the Third Legion, and the Arch-Traitor would expend a lot of efforts to uncovering that mystery in the following days of the Heresy.

Horus looked at the weapon presented to him by his little brother. Alpharius had not told how he had reclaimed the warhammer from its traitorous owner, but the Warmaster could guess that it had been quite a fight to do so.

Forgebreaker was kept in a stasis field, preventing it from interacting with Terra in any way. It was a beautiful weapon, but how could it be otherwise ? It had been forged by Fulgrim, after all, and the Phoenician had always claimed that weapon had to be beautiful, so that when the time came that they were no longer needed, they could still be put to use as museum pieces. Horus doubted that such a time would ever come, now.

'It is untainted,' finally declared Magnus. 'Whatever madness has claimed Ferrus, it has not spread to this weapon.'

Horus nodded slowly. There was a significance here, a message that he felt he was missing.

'Perturabo lost his weapon in the Olympian War,' finally said the Primarch of the Sixteenth Legion. 'If he accepts it, I will give Forgebreaker to him.'

After the Massacre, Ferrus was the only traitor Primarch to follow Guilliman on his march to Terra, the two Legions fighting side by side on a hundred worlds during their advance on the Throneworld. The Ultramarines, first among the chosen of the Dark Gods, saw the curse of the Iron Hands without the suspicion of their other cohorts, and were protected from contagion by wards and dark blessings. Amidst the countless broken oaths and sundered friendships, the Thirteenth and Tenth Legion were quite possibly the only ones whose bonds of brotherhood were tightened by the Roboutian Heresy. A theory of the Inquisitors who dare to study the motivations and reasons of each Traitor Legion's fall is that this is due to the fact that Guilliman had nothing to do with the fate of the Iron Hands. While he manipulated the Blood Angels into journeying to their doom on Signus Prime, the contagion of Ferrus Manus and his sons was solely the work of the Dark Gods themselves : there was no deceit between Guilliman and the lord of the Iron Tenth.

Such was the trust Guilliman had in Ferrus that when he left the main theatre of the Heresy to hunt down Alpharius, he gave the reins of the traitor forces to the Gorgon. Though the advance did slow in Guilliman's absence, several systems fell to the implacable march of Ferrus Manus' tactics in the time it took for the Arch-Traitor to finish what he had set up to achieve. When Guilliman returned from Eskrador, convinced to have slain Alpharius, Ferrus returned command without challenge.

The Siege of Terra

'Nightmares came from the heavens, disgorged by ruinous vessels, their veins pulsing with blood black with corruption. Of all the daemons, they were those who bore their ruin the most openly, though it wasn't the deepest among the damned. Plague and despair followed in their wake, for they were ever-present in them, flowing through both their blood and their souls and twisting them ever further from the angels they had been. At their head stood a giant with silver hands, carrying a scythe that sang with the melody of death and the requiem of all existence.'

Excerpt from The Canticle of the Dead

At long last, the fleet of the heretics reached Holy Terra. The Traitor Primarchs came together for this final battle, the dispersed Traitor Legions gathering once more for the greatest challenge of all. The Fist of Iron, flagship of the Tenth Legion, was one of the first vessels to reach Terra's orbit, pushing through the wreckage of the sacrificial first wave. So began the greatest space battle in the history of Mankind, as the fleets of ten full Legions clashed in the skies of Terra, while the Throneworld's orbital defences fired volley after volley at the traitors' ships.

Due to the propagation of the plague aboard their vessels, the Iron Hands had no mortals to pilot their ships and were forced to keep a third of their Legionaries in orbit to keep the fleet of the Tenth Legion in the battle. But all the others, led by Ferrus himself, descended on Terra with a determination born of a growing sense of despair. The contagion was reaching its paroxysm, and if the Emperor was not brought down soon and His secrets uncovered, all hope of curing the Iron Hands would be lost.

As had been the case during the rest of the Heresy, the sons of Ferrus remained true to their orders. They fought alone, both because they were more efficient that way and because ever since Isstvan V, the other Traitor Legions had kept their distances with the pestilent Astartes, their lords quite rightfully fearing the possibility of contagion. Their newly reinforced bodies, made far more resilient by the plagues affecting them, made them uniquely suited to the room-to-room war that stretched out across the entire Imperial Palace. To this day, on Terra, all loyalist Legions who fought in the Siege have monuments which rolls list the names of those they lost to the Iron Hands, alongside oaths of vengeance upon the sons of Ferrus Manus.

However, with several Primarchs defending the walls and corridors of the Emperor's domain, the Blood Angels disobeying their commands and attacking the human population, and the ever-growing tension amongst the rest of the traitors, weeks passed without any ground being gained by the renegades. Finally, the death of Horus broke the stalemate, but before Guilliman could capitalize on the return of the Ninth Legion to the actual battle, the Night Lords and Emperor's Children appeared, while word of the imminent arrival of the Twelfth and Seventeenth Legions was carried over the Warp's tides. Then Sanguinius was slain by the Mournival, and the entire Ninth Legion was no longer in any condition of continuing the fight.

With time running out for the rebellion, Guilliman gathered his remaining brothers to him. Corax and Vulkan elected to stay on the outside battlefield, to keep the newly arrived Legions from interfering, and the rest launched a final assault on the Palace. Faced with the might of four Primarchs, two of which – Lion El'Jonson and Roboute Guilliman – were flowing with the mastered power of Chaos, the defenders were broken, and the traitors gained access to the Cavea Ferrum, the ultimate defence of the Palace.

Ferrus Manus never set foot within the labyrinth, however. He stood at the maze's entrance with his favoured sons, preventing the defenders from regrouping and striking at the back of Roboute's group. For several hours, the Primarch held his ground against counter-attacking forces of the various loyalist Legions present at Terra. At his side was the Terminator Elite of his Legion, a dreadful gathering of champions known as the Morlocks. Many heroes fell before them, with the death of Amon of the Thousand Sons, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship and Equerry of the Primarch Magnus, standing out among them. The Thousand Sons Captain had survived the wrath of Leman Russ on Nikaea, only to die years later under the blows of Ferrus Manus. However, he unleashed his full psychic might before his fall, and the wounds he dealt to the Primarch of the Iron Hands with the fires of his very soul are said to still hurt the traitor to this day.

No loyalist managed to get pass the Iron Hands' elite and their Primarch. The Tenth Legion was still holding its ground when word began to spread across vox-channels and psychic links alike : the Heresy was over. Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines, Anointed of the Pantheon, Champion of the Dark God and architect of the rebellion, was dead.

The Plague Colossi

Prior to the Heresy, the Iron Hands enjoyed a close relation with the Mechanicum, rivalled only by that of the Iron Warriors. The technology found by Ferrus on Medusa and offered to the lords of Mars was the foundation of this alliance, and it was preserved during the Great Crusade. At the time of the Heresy, the Tenth Legion was accompanied by packs of Titans from several Legios. They were deployed on Pandorax to help in defeating the various great beasts of the death world, and were thus exposed to the curse of Nurgle when it was unleashed.

Almost all mortals accompanying the Iron Hands on Pandorax died within days or weeks of leaving the system. But the crew of the Titans, as well as the Titans themselves, were instead afflicted with the same mutating disease that ran its course among the Legionaries. The tech-priests and princeps were fused to their warmachines, while the weaponry and armor of the Titans mutated into Warp-grown, tumorous chitin and organic-looking cannons. During the Siege of Terra, these gigantic abominations were dubbed the Plague Colossi by the Imperium, a name that many traitor warbands use to this day, and fired their guns at the Palace's walls at Guilliman's command.

Although many were destroyed during the Siege, there are still some in existence, and other Titans have been lost to Chaos in this way since the end of the Heresy. The Colossi have no intelligence to speak of, their machine-spirit replaced by a daemonic fusion of all the souls who were linked to it during its transformation. When used in battle by Chaos warbands, they are controlled by Sorcerers of Nurgle, directed toward the foe through sendings of images and emotion rather than explicit commands.

For most of the Long War, the Plague Colossi have remained within the Eye of Terror, for few warlords have ever had the means to press them to their cause. However, in recent years, seers of the Thousand Sons have received visions of a Iron Hand warrior called Anatolus Gdolkin, who has made contact with several of the great daemon engines and pacted them to his will. His goals are unknown, though there are rumors he seeks a world within the Eye of Terror known as the Crucible. Regardless of this theory's veracity, the prospect of the Plague Colossi marching out of the Eye as an united force is a considerable threat to the Imperium – even the defenders of the world-fortress Cadia would find it difficult to push back so many Chaos Titans at once.

The Post-Heresy : The Forgotten War

The Abominable Intelligence

For ten thousand years, the Imperium has existed amongst the endless threats that lurk among the stars. In order to do so, its agents enforce many laws, ranging from the mundane and ultimately meaningless to those very few whose breaking is a threat to all of Mankind. The oldest of these laws, promulgated long before the threat of Chaos was discovered, is the prohibition of the Abominable Intelligence.

Long before the rise of the Emperor, during the Dark Age of Technology, Mankind prospered thanks to the labour of legions of slave-droids. The first galactic empire of Humanity was a place of indolence, with all work done by intelligent robots loyal to their creators. This all ended, however, when the so-called 'Men of Iron' turned against their human masters in a galaxy-wide rebellion. Believing themselves to be superior to Humanity, they attempted to exterminate the entire species, and came very close to succeeding. It was only after a terrible war, the magnitude of which would not be seen again until the Heresy itself, that the Men of Iron were defeated. In the aftermath, the remnants of Mankind swore never to create another sentient machine, in fear of what would happen next time.

There have been many, however, who foolishly believed themselves above this law. Even on Mars, home to the Cult Mechanicum, hundreds of hereteks were discovered and tried during the Great Crusade, guilty of creating their own intelligent machines. Each and every one of those, at some point of their existence, turned against humanity, though some spared their creator before going on a rampage aimed at destroying the human race. It was during these days that the original term used to design such things – Artificial Intelligence – was changed into the version used now. To replace them, the current machine-spirits were designed : human brain matter, either cloned or harvested from criminals, and converted into logical circuits for the myriad mechanisms Humanity requires. From the crude intelligence guiding a Chimera Tank to the god-like minds of the Titans, all constructs of the Adeptus Mechanicus use these machine-spirits to keep the human element at the core of the machine. Even amongst the ranks of the corrupt Dark Mechanicum and the Traitor Legions, the creation of Abominable Intelligence is regarded as vile and foolish. The Dark Gods themselves, it is rumoured, abhor such soulless sentience.

There have been many theories as to why machines with an Abominable Intelligence inevitably turn on Mankind. Tech-priests claim that it is because they lack the spark granted upon every device by the Machine-God, while scions of the Ecclesiarchy argue that any man attempting to emulate the God-Emperor by creating intelligent life is inviting divine punishment. To those not entrapped in such theological debates, however, there is another, darker possibility. Abominable Intelligences operate solely on logic, watching the universe around them with absolute objectivity. Their reasoning is unflawed by any emotion or involvement. Yet every such sentience comes to the same conclusion : Mankind is a plague that must be exterminated. Perhaps, when the machines sense the touch of the Warp on all of us, they conclude that our entire species is a danger to both ourselves and the galaxy, and must be wiped out.

When news reached them that Guilliman was dead, the Iron Hands lost all hope of curing themselves of the terrible curse ravaging them. Many of them despaired, and chose to die on Terra at the loyalists' blades rather than suffer the slow degeneration and agonizing death that awaited them. Ferrus, however, refused such a fate, and he ordered his sons to withdraw, leaving those who chose death behind as unworthy cowards. Entire companies were thus lost to the renewed fury of the Loyal Legions, while their brothers fled the Solar System – never to return. Like most of the other Traitor Legions after the end of the Siege, the Iron Tenth fled for its homeworld, to regroup, resupply, and consider the options still opened to it after such a disastrous defeat. However, when the Iron Hands arrived within the system of Medusa, they quickly found out that something terrible had happened during their absence. The cities didn't answer their vox-hails, and various signals emanated from the surface.

Gunships were sent to investigate, and soon it became apparent that an enemy force had attacked Medusa during the Heresy, destroying its cities and exterminating its population. That force was still on the planet, waiting for the Iron Hands to come home. When the first Chaos Marines set foot on the world, they revealed themselves, slaughtering these scouting parties. And so began what is known to very few in the galaxy as the Forgotten War.

Except for the highest-ranking members of the Inquisition (such as those with the credentials required to access this archive), none within the Imperium may know the truth of the Forgotten War of Medusa, for it is related to one of the darkest forbidden technologies in existence, and the very knowledge of its existence is considered ground for execution by many within the Ordos' ranks. It was no Imperial force that the Iron Hands faced on their homeworld, but an echo of Mankind's previous sins, rendered into cold steel and malign, soulless sentiences. Amidst the ruins of Medusa, the machines had felt the change in the galaxy's fortunes, and they had risen from their tombs to purge the world from the tainted ones that claimed to be its masters. An exact datation of the uprising is impossible, but it is estimated that the machines rose about the time the first bombs fell upon Isstvan III. It is highly unlikely that this was a mere coincidence, and many wonder if the rise of the machines wasn't, in this one singular occasion, a blessing for the rest of Mankind – the Tenth Legion would have been able to wreck untold havoc among the galaxy if they had not been dragged into the Forgotten War.

Though there was little to win in such a war, Ferrus refused to let this affront to his Legion pass, and the full might of the Tenth descended upon Medusa. They had taken considerable losses during the Heresy, but the Iron Hands were still a power to be reckoned with, and the battles between the corrupt scions of Nurgle and the ancient drones shook the very core of the planet upon which they fought. It was during this war that a change befell the Tenth Legion : where before they had rejected the disease running through their blood, they began to accept and embrace it. With all hope of a cure lost, they fell deeper and deeper into madness, their iron resolve finally giving way to despair and allowing the lies of Chaos to take root in their souls. By the time the war was over, they had completed the transition from infected Traitor Marines to Chaos Marines dedicated to Nurgle.

When the retribution forces of the Imperium arrived to Medusa, the planet was a smoking wreck, its atmosphere saturated with levels of radiation that not even a fully-armored Astartes could survive for long. Which of the two sides nuked the planet is unknown : maybe the Iron Hands, sensing the approach of the fleet, chose to destroy what they couldn't keep, or maybe the machines, on the brink of defeat, denied their foes the prize. Since then, however, the radiation levels had diminished far too fast for it to be the result of the natural process : the planet became tolerable to human life a mere thousand years after the Forgotten War. To the outside eye, Medusa appears much like it was when the Imperium first found it : a world of deserts, dotted with ruined cities and ancient relics. This has caused those of the Adeptus Mechanicus who know of the planet's secrets to press for another expedition to harvest its treasures, despite the obvious dangers. So far, none have been allowed. Some things are too dangerous to be known, and not all are born of Chaos – this is the final lesson of Medusa to the Imperium of Man.

Asirnoth, the great silver wyrm of legend, had returned.

The beast that he had defeated – the beast that his arrival had unleashed, which had slain an entire tribe before he had been able to reach it – had returned. The rest of the machines had sought out its carcass, and they had rebuilt it, reawakening the ancient digital mind buried within its coils.

They faced each other in the ruins of one of the Seven Cities, on streets paved with the skulls of its people. Why the machines would have done something like that, which seemed a considerable waste of time and effort, Ferrus had no idea. The mind of the sapient machines was unknowable, even to him, even now, when so much of the universe's secrets had been revealed to him. All he knew was that these things were evil, and needed to be destroyed before they brought low Mankind and prevented Grandfather's plans from coming to fruition.

After the Forgotten War, the Iron Hands journeyed to the Eye of Terror, driven by their Primarch's visions of a world within its confines where they would be safe from the retribution of the Imperium. Newly appeared Sorcerers – for the Tenth Legion had, prior to their fall, refused the use of psykers, seeing them as both unnatural and unreliable – guided their ships through the tides of Hell. With the favor of Nurgle, they were able to navigate its currents, their minds opened to the Immaterium by the Dark God's warping touch. Finally, they found their Legion's new homeworld, and began to prepare for the long work of bringing Nurgle's vision for the galaxy into fruition : an infinite expanse of ever-renewing rot and decay, with the God of Life and Death granting his love to all of creation.

Organization

The Rust Masters

Before their fall to the Ruinous Powers, the Iron Hands' so-called Frater Ferrum, or Iron Fathers, were an elite circle composed of members from all prestigious ranks within the Legion. Techmarines, Captains, Chaplains and Apothecaries alike were selected by their peers for induction within the order's ranks. They were apart from the rest of the hierarchy, and tasked by the Primarch himself with guiding the Legion's path on matters both philosophical, tactical and technical, combining their approaches and knowledge to reach the best possible decision.

As Nurgle's Rot spread across the ranks of the Iron Hands, the Iron Fathers were the most affected by the mental pollution that befell the entire Legion. Their iron-clad beliefs were slowly eroded by visions of the Warp, and as is the rule for all who succumb to Chaos, the more righteous one is before the fall, the greater the infamy once the transition is complete. Many Iron Fathers chose to take their own lives while in the throes of the Rot, while others choose the path of full mechanization in desperation – earning a far worse fate. But those who were strong enough to survive were twisted into horrible mockeries of the champions of the Great Crusade they had once been : they became the Rust Masters, greatest zealots of Nurgle among the damned.

These lords of rot and decay are all champions of the Plague God, bearing his mark and fighting to spread his word and power. They are devout priests of the word of Nurgle, and where they were dour, isolated souls before, they now take an almost obscene joy in their work. Many of them lead their own warbands, but they generally serve a role of adviser to the Chaos Lords of the Tenth Legion, as well as to other rulers of the scions of Chaos. Cults capable of overthrowing a planetary governor have been born from their speeches and contagion, turning loyal populations into legions of plague zombies and desperate dying men and women praying Nurgle for their deliverance.

In battle, the Rust Masters are as tough and resilient as any other Chaos Marine, but it is their words that are their true weapon. They are agents of psychic corruption, and those who listen to their words find them echoing in their dreams years after the encounter, slowly brainwashing them and turning them from the Emperor's Light. Their madness and devotion to the Plague God are so strong that they spread from them into the Warp, and those exposed to it must purge themselves through prayer and devotion to the Emperor, or risk losing their very soul. Space Marines are more resistant to this affliction of the soul, but even they are not immune, and thorough history, entire companies of loyal Astartes have been lost to the Rust Masters – sometimes torn by inner conflict months or years after the actual battle against the servants of Nurgle.

Between the losses taken at Pandorax, the Legionaries sacrificed at Isstvan III, the warriors lost during the Heresy, those left on Terra and fallen during the Forgotten War, and the Legion's difficulty to recruit new Astartes, the Tenth Legion is estimated to be the smallest Traitor Legion in existence. Though precise numbers are impossible to obtain (it is unlikely that Ferrus himself knows how many of his treacherous sons still 'live' in the nightmarish fashion of their kind), Legion analysts believe that the Tenth Legion cannot count more than twenty thousand Legionaries throughout all the galaxy and the various hellish realms where they hide from the Emperor's Judgement.

However, this does not mean that the Iron Hands are any less of a threat than any other of the Traitor Legions – far from it. While their numbers may be low, the Iron Hands are possibly one of the most united Legions, with the least recorded occurrences of intra-Legion conflict. Although all sons of Ferrus are rivals for the favor of their Primarch and Dark God, they still possess a twisted sense of brotherhood, and their ambitions are not worldly enough for them to come into conflict. Very rarely does an Iron Hand renounces his Legion's colors, and warbands of the former Iron Tenth aren't as afflicted with backstabbing and scheming as their comrades in damnation.

The hierarchy of the Legion has endured through the millenia. At the top stands Ferrus Manus himself. The master of the Tenth Legion has long ascended into the ranks of the Daemon Primarchs, becoming a prince of the Neverborn, highest in Nurgle's favor. Like all of his brothers who have been twisted by the Ruinous Powers, he involves himself little in the day-to-day management of his Legion, spending most of his immortal existence waging the wars of his Dark God in the Great Game of Chaos. Unlike them, however, it is unknown at which point exactly the Tenth Primarch shed his mortal flesh to become an abomination to all that is whole and pure in this universe. From the beginning of the Heresy in Isstvan to the battle of Terra, Ferrus Manus was so consumed by the corruption of Nurgle that even the greatest seers of the Thousand Sons have failed to isolate the instant of his transformation. Perhaps there wasn't one : while most ascensions to daemonhood are violent affairs, triggered when the concentration of Warp energy within one champion of Chaos is too high for his mortal soul to contain it any longer, it is believed by some Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus that Ferrus' own fall was gradual, with the Plague God slowly eroding his soul until nothing remained. Some even whisper that this process is not complete yet : that there is still some humanity left in Ferrus Manus even now, preventing him from truly ascending as Nurgle's chosen avatar within the galaxy.

While they still revere him, his chosen sons have accepted that their father can no longer lead them as he once did, and have taken it upon themselves to provide the leadership the rest of the Legion needs. Captains who led their men during the Great Crusade and the Heresy still do so today, although none of them have kept all the forces under their command intact. When they fall in the trials of the Long War, other champions rise to claim the rank for themselves, earning it through ritual duels, the respect of their peers, or the favor of Nurgle or Ferrus. Warbands of the Tenth Legion call themselves Clans, adopting traditions and beliefs all of their own in their quest to be closer to their Primarch and dark patron. The Rust Masters, formerly known as the Iron Fathers, are the spiritual heart of the Tenth Legion, with many leading their own warbands in search of Nurgle's favor.

Frater Thamatica, the Plaguewrought

It is often said that madness and genius are two sides of the same coin, and nowhere is this saying as clearly proved than in the Iron Hand known as Frater Thamatica. Once a Techmarine from the Iron Hands, he was elevated to the Iron Fathers very quickly after his training on Mars was complete. When the Rot spread within the Tenth Legion, he was at the forefront of the research aiming to cure it. He tried various ways to drive it out, resorting to more and more desperate measures – though he never attempted the full-mechanization others tried. In one terrible experiment, he attempted to separate the pathogens within him from the rest of his body by interfering with his own existence on a quantum level, dissociating the Rot from his being. He failed, and the backlash of the attempt rewrote his entire psyche, driving him irredeemably mad. It also converted all of the remaining living flesh on his body into a living and sentient incarnation of Nurgle's Rot, his very soul absorbed by it. Now, the one known across all Traitor Legions' warbands as the Plaguewrought is an ever-shifting mass of pathogens and rusted augmetics, speaking with a thousand voices at once.

Exiled from the Tenth Legion for the damage caused by his experiments, Thamatica rules an entire daemon world within the Eye of Terror, in collaboration with elements of the Dark Mechanicum. There, he pursues his research into the secrets of both the Warp and the material realm, sending expeditions throughout the Eye and beyond to seek out the relics of ancient civilizations – human and otherwise. Like all sons of Ferrus, he wants to spread Nurgle's contagion, but his ambitions are far beyond that of his brothers. He thinks that, by understanding the inner workings of reality itself, he will be able to infect the very laws of physics with the madness of Chaos.

Homeworld

Shadrak Meduson

Once known to the Imperium as the Captain of the 10th Clan-company of the Iron Hands, Shadrak Meduson was an honorable warrior and a reliable commander. On one occasion, during the Great Crusade, he distinguished himself by taking control of the entire Legion in his Primarch's absence. The world on which it happened, known as One-Five-Four-Four, was controlled by the Eldar, and the xenos were present in such strength than the forces of three Legions were combined to conquer it : the Iron Hands, the Death Guard and the Salamanders. When Ferrus Manus disappeared, his First Captain Gabriel Santar led a rescue mission, while Meduson took overall command of the Tenth Legion's forces, cooperating with Vulkan and Mortarion to break the back of the Eldar presence. This feat earned Meduson much respect amongst all Legions, for even if it had been only for a moment, he had been a Legion Master in all but name.

After the Heresy and the Forgotten War, Shadrak split off from his Legion's main force. He took his Clan-company with him to the world of Dwell, a prosperous and technologically advanced world which had miraculously been spared by the horrors of the Heresy. His forces quickly overwhelmed the planet's human defenders, but Meduson had not come for the human population. His goal were the databanks of the planet, the repositories of knowledge of Dwell. For countless generations, the inhabitants hadn't buried their intellectual elite in the traditional way : instead, they had placed their preserved brains within a giant data-engine, capable of accessing all of their accumulated knowledge. These Halls of the Dead were a treasure of lore, and teams of the Martian Cult had been pouring over its records ever since the world's peaceful compliance.

By desecrating the remains of the dead and erasing all traces of their combined knowledge, Shadrak earned the boon of daemonhood, becoming one of the first Astartes to ascend to the rank of Daemon Prince. Having completed his unholy ritual, he and his men left the planet behind, while hosts of Neverborn began to appear in the aftermath of the desecration, feasting on the remnants of the population.

Today, the warband of Meduson calls itself the Sons of Medusa, in memory of their fallen homeworld and homage to their leader. They are one of the most dangerous warbands of the Iron Hands, possibly of all the Traitor Legions. The last sighting of their fleet indicate that they are operating around the forge-world of Moirae.

While the Iron Hands control dozens of worlds within the Eye of Terror, they, like the other Traitor Legions exiled in the Eye, have chosen a world to be their home – a replacement for Medusa, lost to the Forgotten War. Their new central fortress is located on a daemon world deep within the tomb of the Eldar Empire. According to visions from Thousand Sons seers and other psykers, the whole planet is covered in a pestilent jungle. It is a nightmarish realm of plague beasts and colonies of daemon-insects controlled by one central Neverborn sentience. Before the birth of Slaanesh, it was a recreational world for the Eldar elite, where they would come to relax and hunt the great beasts of prey collected from all over the galaxy. It was later claimed by Nurgle during the incessant wars opposing the four Chaos Gods, and with the Iron Hands settling upon it, none of the other three Dark Gods have dared to contest that claim in millenia.

Not all life on this daemon world is born of the Warp. Clans of human beings live there, dozens of them, according to the few seers that can – or are allowed to – pierce the veil of occlusion around the world. They are savage tribes, and they do not live long lives – both as individual and as collectivities. Finding sustenance on the daemon world is easy, for there are plenty of dying creatures to hunt and consume. But all life born on the planet is tainted, and the food corrupts the soul and the flesh alike. Those who die on the Tenth Legion's homeworld add their corpse to the rotting biomass of the planet. To avoid the total extinction of human life on the planet, and to feed the hungry marshes of the daemon world, the Iron Hands are forced to always bring more prisoners there, that they release unarmed amidst the jungle, with the basic equipment to form their own tribes – doomed to die out in a few generations at best. Powerful Neverborn are born from the suffering of these unfortunate souls, many of which are bound by the Iron Hands' Sorcerers and used as allies in their wars against the Imperium and the other Traitor Legions.

There are few fortresses there, for any construction decays in a matter of months, no matter how soundly it is built. About the only permanent structure is the fortress in which Ferrus Manus himself dwells. There, Chaos Lords dedicated to Nurgle – be they Iron Hands or not – come pay obedience to the chosen son of their god, bringing offerings of live prisoners and samples of exotic diseases. Known across the Eye as the Court of the Prince of Rust, this is a place where alliances are forged between warlords, and plots are hatched that will bring ruin to billions within the Imperium.

Kardan Stronos, the Bane of Parathen

One of the most recent Chaos Lords to have emerged from the Eye of Terror to plague the Imperium, Kardan Stronos is a powerful champion of Nurgle who is as dangerous as a tactician as he is as a warrior. He came to the attention of the Imperium when he fought and slain a Captain of the Twelfth Legion after he had killed his former master. The World Eater, known to his brothers as Varlag, was killed by the daemon axe wielded by Kardan, his soul consumed by the Neverborn bound to the weapon. This act enabled Kardan to unite the warband behind him, and the world fell to the Ruinous Powers within several months of a gruelling campaign against the forces of the Twelfth Legion.

Today, three centuries after his ascension to Chaos Lord, Kardan Stronos is the overlord of a Chaos empire stretching across several systems, which has so far repelled all Imperial attempts to destroy it. Parathen is now a daemon world, populated by the diseased descendants of its original population and upon which hundreds of thousands of daemons walk. In recent years, Inquisitorial reports indicate that he has sent envoys to the Dark Mechanicum, bargaining for their help in the expansion of his heretical domain.

Beliefs

My hands taunt me.

All the sacrifices I have made, all the oaths I have forsaken. All those I have killed, all the worlds I have conquered. All the changes I have gone through. And still they remain the same. They shine, free of rot and rust, reflecting my face back at me – not the one I wear now, transformed beyond reckoning by the touch of the Grandfather, but the one I had all these years ago, when I first slew the silver wyrm after it murdered an entire Medusan tribe. The face of the naive child who looked at the night sky in wonder, ignorant of the truth of the universe.

But now I know that truth. I know that decay is inevitable, and that it shouldn't be feared. Resisting its process is natural, but futile. Everything ends eventually. Loyalty is ended either by death or treachery, every artifice rusts and corrodes, and no life can truly be eternal. And that is why I also know that the silver on my hands is not forever either.

It may take a thousand years, or ten thousands. It matters not. Time means nothing here, in my domain within the Great Eye. One day the last chip of this hateful covering will fall, and I will be free. Free of my memories, free of my last weakness. Free of doubt and free of regret, truly worthy of Nurgle's love and his plans for me.

And then, the galaxy shall tremble at my name.

The Unholy Scrolls of Neimerel, attributed to the Traitor Primarch Ferrus Manus

During the Great Crusade, the Iron Hands had begun to embrace the beliefs of the Mechanicum, choosing to replace their perceived 'weak' flesh with augmetics. This proved to be their undoing, as the flesh they had neglected turned against them on Pandorax and drew them to madness. Now, the sons of Ferrus Manus worship Nurgle, the Chaos God of Pestilence and Chaos. They praise him as the Grandfather, the God of Life and Death, and a hundred other aggrandizing titles.

In a way, the Iron Hands still believe that the flesh is weak, and that the only way for it to become strong is to receive the pestilent blessings of Nurgle. All of them feel regret for ever resisting his gift, and though they know he has long forgiven them, they fight to prove worthy of his favor. As they see Ferrus Manus as their father, the Iron Hands truly believe the God of Plague to be their grand-sire, thinking he responsible for the creation of their Primarch just as much as the Emperor. To the Iron Hands, spreading the plagues of Nurgle is a holy duty, and those who resist them are pitied, for they are like the sons of Ferrus themselves prior to their understanding of Nurgle's truth. On the battlefield, they spread the word of Nurgle through bolters and poisoned blades, leaving the corpses to rot so that disease can flourish. They do not pursue retreating foes, for they are sure that at least a few of them carry with them the seeds of plague.

They despise the Dark Angels, for they consider – quite rightly – Tzeentch to the be the God of Lies, and his agents to keep the souls of the galaxy from realizing the truth of Nurgle's way. When the Legions Wars erupted in the Eye of Terror, many Rust Masters called for total war against the First Legion, and the conflict between the sons of the Lion and those of Ferrus echoed across the Warp Storm for many millenia. Apart from the Dark Angels, however, the Iron Hands have no qualm with allying themselves with other Legions, though most warbands find their unbound enthusiasm and contagion disquieting to say the least. They generally keep their end of any bargain made with another servant of Chaos, but respond to treachery with great fury, not stopping until the other side has been entirely eliminated. One more than one occasion, a Chaos warband has betrayed a group of Iron Hands and slain them all, only to find out that the whole Tenth Legion was now out for their blood. Today, most Traitor Legions steer clear from the Iron Hands' domains in the Eye, unwilling to risk their wrath.

The Corruption of Contqual

In the last century of the forty-first millennium, the world of Contqual was the theatre of a great battle between the Tenth and Third Legions. The center of the world's governance fell into corruption, cultists slowly rising to positions of influence and subtly sabotaging the system's defences. When the Iron Hands arrived, they expected to find a world ready to fall into their hands, and easily conquered the system's capital hive-city. However, they had underestimated the resolve of the rest of the population. Led by a charismatic Imperial officer, the armed forces of Contqual rose against their treacherous masters and sent an astropathic call for help. It took half a Terran standard year for reinforcements to arrive, during which the loyalist forces fought a long and horror-ridden campaign against the scions of Nurgle, battling in the streets of four hive-cities while the Iron Hands themselves remained in the one they had conquered at the beginning, working on some grand ritual.

When the reinforcements arrived, in the form a Company of Emperor's Children and several Regiments of the Imperial Guard. They linked up with the loyalist forces on the planet, and began to cleanse the hive-cities one by one. Before they were done with that task, however, the Librarians and other psykers among them sensed that the ritual of the Iron Hands was nearing its end, and they launched a desperate attack on the capital in the hope of stopping the spell from reaching completion. There, the sons of Fulgrim faced a Daemon Prince of Nurgle, summoned from the Warp by the scions of the Iron Tenth. Behind the creature was a rift in space from which legions of daemons were beginning to pour.

In the end, the Emperor's Children were able to banish the Iron Hands' Daemon Prince master, forcing the rest of the warband to flee back to whence they came and closing the Warp breach. Contqual, however, was deemed irredeemably corrupt by the Ordo Malleus. After careful examination, its surviving citizens were sent to quarantine worlds, and the planet itself subjected to Exterminatus.

Combat doctrine

The Unchosen

At the end of the Great Crusade and the beginning of the Heresy, when the corruption among the Iron Hands was still seen as something to resist and cure, many sons of Ferrus believed that they could obtain their salvation by following the path of their Legion's creed to its logical end – the replacement of weak flesh with superior iron. To that end, they sought to purge themselves of the disease by extensive augmentation. They believed that by removing the infected parts of their flesh, they would be able to escape the plague that afflicted them. However, the curse of Nurgle ran into more than just their bodies, and deep into their very souls. No matter how much of their flesh they abandonned and replaced, the disease would always reappear in what little was left.

As they kept removing their own flesh, so too did they loose their souls to the slow process of total mechanization. With their emotions lost to cold logic, their reflections in the Empyrean weakened, stopping to be the fierce inferno that characterizes most of the Adeptus Astartes. This both angered Nurgle and made the warriors vulnerable to the myriad spiritual predators that constantly hovered around the souls of the Traitor Legionaries. As the fleet of the Iron Hands was translating in the Warp after the Isstvan Massacre, a flicker in the Geller Shields allowed a host of daemons passage into the ships. Unable to materialize, these Neverborn sought the closest vessels, and possessed the flesh and iron bodies of these men. With their weakened spirits, the Iron Hands were unable to resist, and their souls were entirely subsumed by the daemons. Their incarnate forms became nightmares of twisted metal and warped flesh, dripping corruption and sickness wherever they went.

The other Iron Hands quickly forced these creatures – which they call Unchosen – into submission, binding them with sorcerous wards taught by the Ultramarines. Exorcism was considered, but quickly abandoned : the feeble souls of the possessed would not resist the arduous process. Instead, Ferrus Manus declared that the Unchosen were weaklings and fools who would continue to serve the Legion. Though their intellect is limited, the Unchosen can be directed on the battlefield, and their presence is often a sign that things are about to go wrong for whoever stands against the Tenth Legion this day. Their exact abilities vary from one individual to another, but their endurance is the stuff of nightmares, and their strength is prodigious. To this day, Sorcerers of the Iron Hands bind them into the service of their warlords, and a warband will go to great lengths to secure the bond of even one such powerful creature – though some consider them insults to their Legion and refuse to associate with them.

Although no Iron Hand has been foolish enough to follow the path of their forsaken brothers, there have still been additions to the numbers of the Unchosen since this first fateful night. Some Iron Warriors have fallen to the ranks of the Unchosen over the millenia as they repeated their futile attempt to purge themselves of Nurgle's corruptive touch. Adepts of the Mechanicum have also been known to succumb to it when they do not respect the strict protocols of augmentation decreed by the Omnissiah. It appears that the Plague God has taken a liking for these particular abominations, and his children seek to earn his unholy affection by creating more of them. The Inquisition had looked into the matter, and it is not unheard of for members of the Ordo to come down upon those who believe they can avoid death by sickness through extensive mechanisation. Worlds that are suffering in the throes of the Plague God's many creations must thus also endure the Unchosen appearing amongst those of their elite class who think they can escape their fate by shedding their very humanity – a fitting punishment for those who betray the God-Emperor's divine design perhaps, but also a great scourge to the innocents around them.

The very nature of the Iron Hands' homeworld in the Eye forces them to seek out captives to bring back to their unholy realm. Although they do not hesitate to raid other worlds within the Eye of Terror, playing the Great Game of Chaos as well as any other Traitor Legion, they are unwilling to risk igniting the fury of the Legions Wars anew. Therefore, most warbands instead turn their attention to the Imperium. Nurgle values victory over his brother Dark Gods, but he enjoys the tearing down of the Emperor's domain just as much, and it is far easier for the Iron Hands to wage war against Imperial Guardsmen and militia than against the other Traitor Legions.

Though the Iron Hands still possess a fleet worthy of a Space Marine Legion, outside of raids their ships are empty of human or mutant life. The aura of the Iron Hands makes it impossible for them to employ mortal crews, forcing them to use their own mechanical skills to pilot and maintain their vessels. Even their ships decay around them, with engines failing and plates of reinforced iron turning to rust in mere months, forcing them to perform endless repairs to keep them sailing. But this aura of disease is also one of the Tenth Legion's primary assets when they raid Imperial worlds.

The motivation of the Iron Hands' raids play a huge part in their choice of targets. They mostly attack highly populated worlds, sometimes finding themselves in conflict with forces from the Ninth Legion, who also require a constant supply of fresh slaves, albeit for a very different purpose. Fortunately – in a manner of speaking – the methods by which the Iron Hands wage war forever prevent an alliance between these comrades in damnation.

When a warband of the Iron Hands arrive within Imperial space, their first move is to reach out to the cults of Nurgle already present and those most vulnerable to their lies : the mutants and the downtrodden, the hopeless and the sick. Small groups of Legionaries come down to the worlds to spread the contagions running through their own bodies. Then the warband waits patiently for the plague to infect millions, and turn the entire planet into a hellish vision of corpses left to rot in the street and total collapse of the social order. It is only after the world is fully in the throes of the Warp-born epidemic that the Traitor Legionaries reveal themselves, striking without mercy in order to destroy the last remnants of order in the system. Then, they profit of the confusion to abduct as many humans as they can, massing them in their ships before disappearing, leaving behind them worlds filled with the ghosts of a murdered culture. It is difficult to evaluate just how many prisoners are taken in such raids – the state of the remaining population makes standard counts impossible, and the warped ships used by the Tenth renders comparison with Imperial ships' holding capacity worthless.

Apart from these raids, on rare and dreadful occasions a particular Chaos Lord will manage to gather a great number of Iron Hands under his banner. The Plague Crusades are generally aimed at one specific objective, such as the destruction of a particularly well-defended hive-world or the profanation of a temple-world guarded by the Adeptus Sororitas. In these occasions, they abandon most of their tricks and resort to open warfare. Thousands of sons of Ferrus Manus take to the field, led by their ascended Plague Marines, the sky is darkened by clouds of daemonflies, and most mortals who stand in their way fall to the ground long before the Legion of Nurgle actually reaches them, their bodies ravaged by the pestilence walking ahead of the Tenth Legion.

On these occurrences, only another Legion can stop the Iron Hands. The physiology of the Space Marines is the only thing – aside from faith in the God-Emperor – capable of resisting the cursed diseases that are brought forth from the Warp by such concentration of blasphemous souls. Even then, once the Plague Crusade is broken and the Iron Hands forces beaten back or destroyed, it is most often necessary to purge the entire world upon which the battle occurred with fire. Legionaries fighting against the Iron Hands are also examined, and those bearing signs of disease are quarantined by their Legion's own Apothecaries and brought to special confinement grounds, where they fight against the disease with willpower as much as medical attention. Every loyal Legion has these sanctuaries, and each also has a tally of all those who did not leave them alive.

Ulrach Branthan, the Enthroned King

Once known to the forces of the Great Crusade as the Captain of the Iron Hands' 65th Clan-company, Ulrach Branthan is one of the most powerful Chaos Lords of the Tenth Legion. On the killing fields of Isstvan V, he was mutilated by a warrior of the Death Guard and left for dead as the loyalists withdrew under the command of Mortarion and Alpharius. However, the mutations that already afflicted him kept him alive, and he was recovered by his warriors in the aftermath of the Massacre. He was then brought aboard his ship, the Sisypheum, and his Apothecaries worked to heal the terrible wounds he had taken. They succeeded, but only by implanting him with a piece of ancient technology plundered from the ruins of Medusa in the Captain's youth : the Heart of Iron. This artefact kept Ulrach from dying, but it reacted poorly with the corruption present in the Captain's body. Machine and mutated flesh war eternally against each other within his body, requiring him to be kept under the care of several fleshsmiths at all time, while he endures unspeakable agonies. At the same time, this condition has drawn the attention of Nurgle, who favours Ulrach for the torment he endures without flinching. Trapped on his chamber, the Enthroned King, as he is known to his followers, is able to send out his spirit to cultists across the galaxy, inspiring new heresies and preparing the field for his warband. He also receives various visions from his Dark God, which have caused his status among the devotees of Nurgle to soar ever since the days of the Heresy. Hundreds of cults hidden within the Imperium pay fealty to him, and he commands one of the largest Tenth Legion warband in existence, responsible for countless acts of destruction and corruption during the ten thousand years of the Long War. Both the Emperor's Children and the Iron Warriors have suffered great losses in battle involving the Enthroned King, and his name is written upon both Legions' rolls of enmity.

With the Chaos Lord unable to leave the ship, it is his Equerry, Cadmus Tyro, who leads the warband on the battlefield. Branthan follows the moves of his favored agent through an ancient archeotech automata shaped as a bird of prey, twisted by the energies of the Warp into a daemonic raven-machine. Those who serve the Enthroned King call the creature Garuda, and it rumoured to be indestructible and that all it sees is also seen by Branthan himself.

Recruitment and Geneseed

The Horror of Gaudinia Prime

Yet another grim example of the Iron Hands' infamy, the system of Gaudinia was lost to Chaos in the ninth century of the forty-first millennium. Gaudinia was a prosperous system, which had remained untouched by war since the first colons had arrived upon it three thousand years ago. It traded with neighbouring systems and supplied reliable, well-equipped regiments of the Imperial Guard for most of its history. Then, without any warning, an army of several hundreds Iron Hands appeared on the planet, spread in several groups – one for each major city on the planet. It was later discovered that the Traitor Marines had been brought on the world over the course of almost a millenia, one by one. All of them were placed in stasis coffins and hidden by Chaos cultists, sleeping out of time in wait for the moment of their awakening. Entire generations of infiltrators spent their lives smuggling the Chaos warriors onto their planet, believing that their actions would earn them the favor of Nurgle in the afterlife.

Upon their awakening, the Iron Hands slaughtered the entire population of Gaudinia Prime, abandoning their usual approach of letting their plagues do their work for them. The violent death of billions thinned the layer between the Warp and reality, and a host of daemons manifested itself on the planet. By the time Imperial forces arrived in response to the planet's desperate pleas for help, there wasn't a single survivor on the planet. Hideous afflictions had turned those unlucky enough to live through the first carnages into shambling horrors, enslaved to the Iron Hands and their Neverborn allies, while the souls of the dead were fed upon by the daemons of Nurgle.

The Gaudinian Regiments of the Imperial Guard and the elements of the Death Guard were forced to purge the entire planet, one city at a time. Although several of the regiments involved had to be purged afterwards, others were judged untainted by the experience of walking through the ruins of their homeworlds, and they continued to serve the Imperium alongside the Fourteenth Legion. Few of the Guardsmen who witnessed the Horror with their own eyes still live, but the traditions of the Regiments are proudly maintained by their sons and daughters.

To speak of the state of the Tenth Legion's gene-seed is to try to understand the madness that consumes them all. Purity itself is anathema to the Power that enslaves them, and this reflects in the alterations made to their transhuman physique. Before the Heresy, the Iron Hands were stern, stoic figures, with a fierce temper that was always kept in check through sheer willpower. It was believed that their distance with common humanity may have been due to a flaw in their gene-seed, perhaps by causing an emotional severance with the rest of Mankind greater than that experienced by all Legionaries upon their ascension.

Whether this is the case, however, has become completely irrelevant in the front of the other corruption that has poured into the Tenth Legion's bloodline over their ten thousand years of devotion to Nurgle. Countless diseases and degenerations afflict them, and those who have transcended into Plague Marines aren't, by any definition of the term, truly alive. It is only these Iron Hands who are still awaiting their transformation who are capable of producing gene-seed, riddled with infections as it may be. Even if the subject survives the diseases, the gene-seed is far from perfect : almost every Iron Hand has at least one Astartes organ non-functional, depending on the particular combination of contagions this warrior suffers. Ironically, the Tenth Legion is perhaps the one of the Traitor Legions with the most Apothecaries left in its ranks, and they take their duties very seriously. On the battlefield, they collect the progenoid glands of their fallen brethren, displaying a care and respect for their brothers unseen among any other of the Traitor Legions.

Despite these efforts, very few progenoids can be successfully harvested. With the already diminished numbers of the Iron Hands and the new battles waged within the Eye of Terror, traditional replenishment of the Legion's ranks would have quickly caused it to end up extinct. This has caused the Apothecaries to innovate, turning to Nurgle for help. The Plaguefather's answer was to send his chosen warriors an abomination of the Warp, known to those strong of will or insane enough to bear such lore as the Nerragalia. Located on the daemonic homeworld of the Tenth, the Nerragalia is a sapient daemonic tree, within which were placed the progenoids of hundreds of dead Iron Hands and other Legionaries at the beginning of this pact.

The Nerragalia feeds on the rotting biomass of the planet, and produces repugnant, bloated fruits within which new progenoids can be harvested, riddled with even more pestilences than those already present within the Iron Hands. The daemon tree is a treasure of the Legion and Nurgle, and is defended at all time by hundreds of warriors and tens of thousands of Neverborn, pacted by the Legion's Sorcerers and willingly serving alike. When warbands return to the daemonworld after a campaign, its Apothecaries will bring the gene-seed of the fallen to the Nerragalia, feeding the essence of the dead to the great tree so that it may be renewed by Nurgle and spread across all future Iron Hands. It is said that Nurgle himself sees it as one of his finest work : a life-bringing entity whose creation is a pure instrument of decay. Ferrus himself sometimes walks under its shadow, and the Daemon Primarch has even aided in the harvest on occasion. The progenoids touched by his hands are fiercefully sought after by the Apothecaries, as they are believed to be especially blessed by the Ruinous Powers.

Recruits for the Tenth Legion generally come from the worlds invaded. Among those captured to be brought back to the Legion's homeworld, the young males are deliberately exposed to violent contagions – even more so than the rest of the unfortunate souls captured by the traitors – and fed an infected sludge that forcefully grows their body into something approaching the first stage of genetic transformation to Astartes. Most 'aspirants' die horribly in the process, but those who survive are then taken to the Apothecaries' workshops, where the progenoids are implanted. The process is abominably painful, for it is not just the subject's genetics which are forcefully overwritten : his very soul is exposed to the taint of Nurgle, drowned in visions of endless decay until it finally breaks and he submits to the Grandfather. Some Apothecaries of the Iron Hands have remarked that the longer an aspirant endures before breaking down, the more Nurgle seems to favor him afterwards. This is in accordance to what is known of the Plague God's nature, for he enjoys the struggle of those afflicted by his creations as much as he appreciates the devotion of the heretics that praise his name in word and deed.

The Plague Marines

Those Iron Hands who can gain the favor of Nurgle and survive long enough earn the transformation into one of the most feared warriors in the galaxy : a Plague Marine. Not all those who reach this ascended status are sons of Ferrus, however : Space Marines from the other Traitor Legions – and even a few renegades from the loyal ones – have been known to become Plague Marines if they followed Nurgle for long enough and served the Plague God's designs well. Nurgle cares little for the origin of his servants, so long as they serve and love him.

When an Astartes willingly dedicates his body and soul to the God of Life and Death, he is almost immediately infected with a myriad different diseases, much like any mortal devotee. However, a Space Marine's enhanced physiology can endure far more pathogens than a normal human. While most followers of Nurgle either die shortly after embracing their ruinous ways or spend the rest of their existence halfway between life and death, the Chaos Marines who walk that path remain wholly alive for all of their existence. As they commit more blasphemies in the name of their patron, more and more diseases are added to their flesh. When the amount of corruption in their bloodstream is so great that even their transhuman body cannot cope, they die, and their souls are taken to the Garden of Nurgle. There, they are drenched in the pestilent waters that irrigate the Garden, the very essence of Nurgle dripping in their souls. Many are entirely consumed by the experience, while others are entranced by the nightmarish beauty of the Garden, and elect to stay in this hellish afterlife. The rest are returned to their corpses and restored to a twisted parody of life : they have become Plague Marines.

Plague Marines feel no pain, and do not suffer from the symptoms of the uncountable diseases they host in their necrosed flesh. They are bloated with the corruption of Nurgle, and the Warp-born contagions that they exhale with every breath are so potent that very few can deal with them without succumbing. Corrupted slime drips from their rusted armor, while their Warp-touched aura reshapes their surroundings in the image of the Garden. Each and every one of them carries a close-quarters weapon covered with a mix of poisons and pathogens that makes even the smallest scratch a lethal wound. They also manufacture grenades from their own rotten innards, using the explosives to expose a maximum of enemies to their contagion in a single blow.

So lethal are the contagions of the Plague Marines that even the other Chaos Marines dedicated to Nurgle can hardly survive their presence for any extended period of time. Thus, while the Plague Marines are looked up to by their non-ascended brothers, they are also perpetually separated from them, and it is a separation that weighs on their being : despite all their alterations, they are still Astartes at the core, and crave brotherhood and unity of purpose like any Legionary. To appease this solitude, they gather in squads of their own, and spearhead the advance of Iron Hands forces. A few, capable of bearing the severance from the rest of their kind, wander the galaxy alone as champions of the Plague God, spreading decay and destruction in their wake. All of them, however, are waiting for the day when all Iron Hands have left behind their mortality and ascended to the ranks of the Plague Marines – when they can once more act as a Legion, under the command of Ferrus Manus and the will of Nurgle.

Warcry

Iron Hands relish battle, for war is to them the ultimate theatre of decay, the place where all things fall victim to the inevitable hold of decay. Discretion never enters their mind, for the aura of death they exude would betray them in a moment. Instead, they call out to their foes in joy, accompanied by the shrieking voices of minor daemons manifesting in their threads. Though their vocal chords are often damaged by their afflictions, the words they shout at those they face can still be recognized in most case – whether this is a coincidence, a sign of the Traitor Marines' resilient physiology, or a whim of Nurgle is unknown. When fighting Imperial human soldiers, the Iron Hands shout warcries like 'Rejoice, maggots, for the chosen of Nurgle are among you !', 'Surrender and accept the Grandfather's love !' or 'Your resistance pleases him as much as shall your death !'. Things change, of course, when they are faced with warriors of the other Legions, be they loyal or traitor : then the joy is replaced by focus, and the goal of capture turns into one of execution. In these circumstances, often used warcries include : 'For the Grandfather and the Primarch !', 'We bring the endless pestilence !', and 'Bow before the tides of decay !'

---

AN : hello, dear readers ! It has been a long time since both this fic's last update and any activity on my account, and I am sorry about that. I had one ongoing chapter for each of my fics, and all of them are going to be complete in quick succession. Consider this the first part of a Christmas package of sort : one Index Astartes of the Roboutian Heresy, one chapter of Warband of the Forsaken Sons, and one short story.

So, the Iron Hands. I never really liked them in canon - not their concept, which is awesome, but I cannot really bring myself to care about them over the more humane Legions. When I first laid out the mythos of the Roboutian Heresy, they were the Legion which I felt would be the less difficult to turn against the Imperium - something which is even acknowledged in-universe in canon. Seriously, Horus thought that just sending Fulgrim talk to Ferrus would be enough to convince him to betray the Emperor. With their disdain for living flesh, which only grew worse after the death of Ferrus Manus, it really isn't difficult t see why, even if using someone else than a mad narcissist may have yielded different results. But since I wanted the Iron Hands not just to rebel, but to fall to Nurgle (and that I had made the mistake to write in the first chapter that they were corrupted by the time of Isstvan V) I had to find a way to forcefully turn them to Chaos. Pandorax was quite an obvious choice as for the place where it would happen (for those of you who don't know, it features in a Horus Heresy novel titled The Damnation of Pythos).

This chapter is a little shorter than the previous one about the Blood Angels. At the same time, I do believe it is more dense, and I think that will be the standard length for the next chapters of this fic. Like with all previous ones, it took quite a bit of research, including one piece of lore that I am quite certain is no longer canon : the novel Iron Hands, published in 2004 and taking place during the 13th Black Crusade. In that book, one Iron Hand believes that Ferrus Manus is in stasis, which I think we can all agree is quite contradictory with established lore - and just how likely is it that the Chapter would forget how its Primarch died, especially since they remember the Emperor's Children's part in it ? But I still got one useful concept to twist from the book. See if you can recognize it !

As usual, if you have a commentary, see conflict within what I have written so far, or have an idea for what is yet to come, leave a review !

That's all for now. See you very soon for the second part of the Christmas package,

Zahariel out.