The Leonine Heresy

by Sharrowkyn

Inspired by the Roboutian Heresy, this is the tale of Lion El'Jonson's fall to Chaos as he leads half of his brothers (and not necessarily the ones you might think) in rebellion against the Emperor. All Index Astartes entries have been completed, and now we are journeying through the various War Zones of the 41st Millennium.

11. Index Astartes: Iron Hands

Chapter 11: Index Astartes- Iron Hands

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Index Astartes- Iron Hands: Souls of True Steel

Nowhere is the Emperor's skill and wisdom more on display than in the transhuman physiology of the Iron Hands, a legion whose virtues have won them fame and respect across the entire galaxy. While the Word Bearers have influence and faith and the Night Lords have justice and honor, the Iron Tenth is the legion whose might and conviction ensures they will never be forgotten. The Sons of the Gorgon have remained unbroken for ten thousand years, protecting the common people of the Imperium, living embodiments of the Emperor's creed of uplifting Humanity. All loyal citizens love the Iron Hands, and they are considered a pillar of the Imperium as they maintain the Emperor's domains through ceaseless sacrifice. Yet rumors of tech-heresy and illicit science are whispered of in the halls of the forge worlds of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and their homeworld lies directly in the path of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. The Iron Hands will hang on to the bitter end, for iron does not bend, but the allies of the Tenth fear for the day when it finally breaks.

Origins: Sturm und Drang

The legend of the Iron Hands begins the same as the rest of the Emperor's legions upon the war-torn world of Terra near the end of M30. Crafted from arcane gene-science within the halls of the Imperial Palace, the X Legion was forged after the Emperor's great victories over the techno-barbarian tribes that had divided and misruled Humanity's homeworld for centuries. Many came from the clans of Old Albia, a hardened land who also contributed sons to the XIV, while others came from the Qavitine Plate cities, vast city-castles that had hung in the sky for millennia before the Emperor rose to power. Yet the bulk of the legion came not from these regions, but from the plains-dwellers of Solus Stellax. Located on the southern edge of the radioactive wastelands of Merica, Solus Stellax was a vast and rugged land. It had but one hive, a mega-city at its heart surrounded by empty plains patrolled by rangers, who rode mechanical equids in vast cavalry formations across the empty expanses. Its natural resources, especially its vast promethium reserves, had led to many invasions during the Age of Strife, and it took the Emperor's personal intervention for the bloc to finally bend the knee. The people of Solus Stellax respected strength, and after witnessing the might of the Emperor's Astartes, eagerly gave their sons to join the nascent X legion. These recruits gave the legion a fierce pride in their warrior ancestry, as well as an emphasis on overwhelming firepower, for Solus Stellax was well-known for its advanced firearms. In recognition of this, the X soon gained the epithet of 'Storm Walkers', a reference to the powerful tornadic cells that swept their homelands.

For the duration of the Unification Wars, the Storm Walkers deployed like most other legions alongside their fellow Astartes to clear out the final techno-barbarian enclaves. However, they soon gained a reputation as they began to fight beyond the confines of Terra during the Solar Reclamation. The X won notable victories against the mutant Scythers of the Mican Aggregation, as well as prosecuting a lightning campaign through the rad-lands of Ganymede. These victories only continued as the legion took to the stars under the able leadership of Legion Master Amadeus DuCaine, whose greatest success came against the foul greenskins at the Battle of Rust. As part of the Seraphina Offensive, the Tenth were part of a vast concerted effort to reduce the xenos presence, a difficult task as orks were notorious for their psychic connection which tended to draw ever more of their wretched kind to the site of any battles. Well aware of this potential threat, DuCaine was determined to bring the campaign to a swift end and destroy the orks in one fell swoop. In what he called 'raising the storm', DuCaine ordered the Imperial Army soldiers to make planetfall, drawing the greenskin hordes in all their numbers towards them. As soon as enough had been drawn in, DuCaine ordered his Astartes to strike. Vast armored columns struck the hordes from all sides but one, a massive encirclement that saw millions of greenskins killed over the course of several days as more and more funneled into the killing grounds in search of a fight. The Imperial Army regiments were decimated, but the greenskins were utterly broken, and DuCaine and his legion became heroes.

Under the leadership of DuCaine, the Storm Walkers became renowned for their skill in armored set piece battles. The intricacies of stealth or the savagery of melee combat were not for them: victory was to be obtained through overwhelming firepower and meticulous forethought. Every engagement was preceded by extensive planning as all data was analyzed and the optimal course plotted out. Though this meant their speed was rather lacking, the Storm Walkers' success rate was one of the best of all the legions. The Tenth became renowned for their skill and application of superior firepower, especially through the use of armor and aircraft. However, while the legion itself minimized their own casualties, other forces attached to them soon discovered the downside of this approach. As noted by tacticians analyzing the Battle of Rust, the Tenth's success came at the cost of the Imperial Army regiments. While comparatively few Astartes died, the regiments who had Raised the Storm were left shattered, and had to be folded into other Army divisions to continue their service. This was replicated at every engagement the Storm Walkers took part in, and the Imperial Army began petitioning not to be assigned to the Tenth. However, these requests were universally denied, as these deaths were not the result of friendly fire, as had occasionally happened with other legions. DuCaine's strategies were based on the fundamental and inescapable truth that human lives were worth less than those of Astartes, and the results spoke for themselves. In only twenty years since Rust, the Storm Walkers had liberated nearly as many systems as the Luna Wolves, and this was without a primarch as well. DuCaine's tactical genius had earned him commendations from the Emperor himself, and the Imperial War Council could not and would not disagree with their master's judgment. Thus the Storm Walkers were allowed to continue as they were, DuCaine's utilitarian tactics making them respected if not loved, until the day their primarch returned.

The Gorgon

As talented as DuCaine was, the Astartes were never meant to be truly self-governing. While they were undeniably posthuman, they were still reasonably close to baseline humanity, especially compared to the Custodes or the Emperor himself. No, the true rulers of the legions were meant to be a class of being from whom the legions themselves had derived. Before crafting the Astartes, the Emperor of Mankind had labored long in secret, creating and forging beings of incredible might and wisdom through hidden processes saved from the Dark Age of Technology. The Primarch Project was the labor of untold time and energy, twenty beings of unique potency surpassed only by the Emperor. Yet before this project could come to fruition, disaster struck. A warp rift somehow opened within the Emperor's laboratories, sucking up the gene-pods which held the nascent Primarchs, and hurling them into the Warp. As disastrous as this was, the damage to the lab also resulted in the destruction of valuable cogitators and ancient relics known as STCs.

STC

Short for 'Standard Template Construct', the STC system was a vast database containing the sum total of humanity's knowledge from the Dark Age of Technology. Every human colony possessed an STC, or even several, which they combined with fabricators to craft anything they may well need. However, the Age of Strife put an end to this technological marvel. The rebellion of the Men of Iron led to widespread distrust of anything resembling advanced technology, and many STCs were destroyed by mobs who had no idea most of their tools came from the fabrication devices. By M30, no intact and functional STC library was known to exist. However, scraps and fragments of data still survived the ravages of time, templates of individual items that had proven too useful or were hidden from the mobs. The Mechanicum of Mars were and still are utterly obsessed with finding these relics, and the Emperor himself had gathered a vast collection, some of which was given to the Mechanicum in exchange for loyalty. It seems likely the Master of Mankind intended to use these inventions to aid in his Great Crusade, but such would never come to pass as a result of that dark day when his laboratories were wrecked.

As the Emperor dealt with the loss of his repositories and the hard work that went into the Primarch Project, the gene-pods containing the fruits of his labor were hurled into the Warp. Scattered across the galaxy by malign forces, the Xth Pod was sent north of Terra, to a gloomy world named Medusa. Despite orbiting a supergiant star, Medusa was frozen and icy, a desolate planet several times the size of Terra that was wracked by constantly shifting tectonic plates. Once a mining world, Medusa was filled with rare minerals used to craft the robotic legions known as the Men of Iron. However, after the Age of Strife, these materials were understandably not in demand anymore, and so the planet was abandoned. Its people sank back into barbarity, eking out a pitiful existence as they roamed the constantly-shifting surface. However, the true horror of Medusa came not from the climate or landscape, but from its location, incredibly close to a permanent Warp Storm of incredible potency: the Eye of Terror. Relatively new, the Eye of Terror was once the core of the Aeldari Empire, the greatest power in the galaxy that Humanity had ever seen. A world like Medusa, so close to the borders of a proud and mighty foe, could only be held by force, yet its resources were worth the trouble. Countless legions of Men of Iron were churned out, hurled into combat to hold off the Depredatory Fleets of the xenos that occasionally assaulted the Human Worlds out of pride, spite, or boredom. When the Men of Iron rebelled, the Aeldari were content to watch humanity tear itself to pieces during the Age of Strife, until their own hubris destroyed their empire from within as well. However, even after the destruction of the Men of Iron and the Aeldari Empire, Medusa was still a world of danger, covered in ruins filled with Dark Age relics containing incredible techno-archaeological treasure or unspeakable horrors.

It was to such a world that the primarch known only as the X came to be. His pod streaked through the sky like a fiery comet, crashing into the highest peak on the planet's surface, the ice pinnacle known as Karaashi. Unlike the rest of his brothers, the being emerging from this pod was no infant or child, but a fully grown man, and it was a blessing that this was the case. From the first moment he emerged, the primarch was thrown into the crucible of combat. The shattering of Karaashi had shook the entire mountain range that it was part of, bringing the creatures lurking within to the planet's surface. The young primarch battled with giants and ogres, with raiders and with the elements themselves, subsisting mostly on sand, his physiology metabolizing whatever inorganic material he could get from the desolate and tainted lands he roamed. Yet it is his battle with the Great Silver Wyrm that merits the most attention.

In his wanderings across the length and breadth of Medusa, the primarch had come to know some of the humans of his homeworld. While some had fought him, others had come to honor him for his strength and resilience. The name they originally gave him is lost to us today, but it matters not, for his actions soon gave him a new name that all would come to know him by. Many beasts still prowled the icy wastes of Medusa, preying on the humans, and the primarch took up pursuit of one such creature after it attacked a village he was visiting. He tracked the beast for days, passing into the dread region known as the Land of Shadows, and descended into the depths of the ground as he pursued it into its lair. There he gave battle to the Great Silver Wyrm, an antediluvian horror that called itself Asirnoth. The Wyrm spoke to the primarch, though the primarch never told anyone what it said, and the two clashed in a titanic struggle that led to the primarch drowning the Wyrm in a river of magma. The primarch expected to withdraw two stumps, yet found his arms unharmed, coated in a silvery metallic material that refused to come off. When he returned to the village to tell the people he had slain the monster, the startled townspeople dubbed him 'Ferrus Manus' in honor of the burnished appearance of his appendages.

Ferrus Manus abandoned his nomadic lifestyle that day, instead staying with the clan as their new ruler. Despite showing no indication before of knowledge, the primarch began to teach the people of Medusa how to craft mechanical wonders of incredible potency, which allowed them to begin to take back their homeworld. The land itself was too tectonically unstable to hold cities of any size, so Ferrus led his people to build and convert vast land-crawlers into habitations, massive engines that roamed the surface. While humanity thrived, Ferrus began to hunt down the remaining horrors, leading salvage expeditions into ruined factories and abandoned mines. They battled with cyborgs and mutants, with technological horrors and warp-beasts. For over twenty years, the primarch fought a relentless struggle to rid at least the surface of dangers, and to a large part he succeeded. Ferrus was a strict taskmaster, setting high goals for himself and his followers. Weakness was despised, but he retained his people's love throughout. They respected his strength, but even more respected his willingness to help people, to shoulder their burdens, and the primarch never asked them to do anything he would not do himself. Thus when Ferrus told them their final task was to join him in leaving Medusa, they did not hesitate.

Far above the planet's surface, a vast orbital ring circling the planet lay visible, a relic from the Dark Age of Technology known as the Telstarax. Using the primarch's technological genius, the remnants of a space elevator were repaired, and a boarding party ascended the thousands of miles to enter the forgotten halls of a technological wonder. They should have left well-enough alone. The Telstarax was filled with technology so advanced it seemed like magic, a ring of science and discovery on a planet-sized scale, though most of it was unusable ruin or twisted into strange shapes from the Empyric energy from the Eye of Terror that occasionally struck the planet like a solar flare. However, its halls were filled with Abominable Intelligences in unprecedented numbers, which soon slaughtered the boarding party, leaving Ferrus to flee as the sole survivor. Swarms of living nanites, endless legions of robotic warriors, spindle-limbed drones: the horrors of the Telstarax were myriad and varied, though uniformly deadly. The Telstarax continued to hang above Medusa, an unspoken and omnipresent threat, but the mechanical nightmares never left their halls, perhaps still governed by strange programming or unable to descend without the space elevator, which the primarch had destroyed during his retreat. For the rest of his time on Medusa, Ferrus never attempted to return to the nightmarish realm; his former rashness had been tempered by a sense of caution and guilt from failing to protect those under his charge, while his enthusiasm for creating mechanical wonders had been tempered into a hidden uneasiness and distrust for the machine.

It was shortly after this raid into the Telstarax that a mysterious stranger came to the world of Medusa. The figure barged into Ferrus's chambers, challenging the sullen primarch to a contest. Ferrus dismissed the intruder, for nobody was his equal, yet the intruder persisted. The man attempted to show Ferrus technological wonders, yet was ignored; promises of authority and power were made, but garnered no reaction. Despite these rejections, the man's smile grew wider and wider as Ferrus kept his emotions in check and ignored the temptations. However, when the man caught sight of the primarch's metal arms, he attempted to touch them, and was thrown through a wall for his troubles, for Ferrus despised people's obsession with his iron hands. Despite taking a blow strong enough to slay a storm giant in one hit, the man simply picked himself up, and attacked Ferrus. The two battled with fist and with weapon, the smaller man somehow able to match the primarch blow for blow. After several hours, Ferrus found himself on his knees, panting from the exertion, while the man stood smiling above him. Thunder boomed as auric lightning flashed, blinding the primarch, and when his vision cleared, Ferrus beheld a mighty warrior in golden armor, three times his former height as he towered over Ferrus. The awe-inspiring figure introduced himself as Ferrus's father, the Emperor of Mankind, and held out his hand to help his son to his feet.

Great Crusade: The Iron Tenth

"What you give, is written in sand; what you take, with an iron hand. We were made to be warriors, engines of war, hammers beating out the fabric of existence into a vessel for Mankind to inhabit. The flesh is weak, but our deeds endure."- Ferrus Manus, 830.M30 upon taking command of his legion.

After swearing loyalty to the Emperor, Ferrus Manus was taken onto the Emperor's ship, though not before he swore an oath to his people that he would return for them. The primarch was astounded by the technological sophistication of the Emperor's personal vessel, the mighty Bucephalus, and spent the entire trip analyzing its many systems. Ferrus had an instinctive grasp of technology, especially those of a destructive nature; yet to those who observed him, it seemed as though he was over-compensating, like he was pretending to seem more interested than he truly was. The Emperor spoke with his son on the state of technology and politics in his Imperium, telling him of the forges of Mars and the necessity for Ferrus to get on their good side. The union of Terra and Mars was still fresh, the Treaty less than thirty years old, and many still had their doubts.

Treaty of Olympus Mons

More commonly known as the Treaty of Mars, this concord was an agreement proposed by the Emperor to avoid a war between Terra and Mars. In exchange for political autonomy, freedom of dogma, and the loyalty of six Navigator Houses, the Mechanicum of Mars would supply the Imperium with the weapons and ships needed to wage a war of galactic conquest. To symbolize this union, the Emperor changed his sigil from the raptor and lightning bolt of the Raptor Imperialis to the two-headed eagle of the Aquila.

Many Martians believed the Emperor to be the living manifestation of the Machine-God, a being they called the Omnissiah, and eagerly swore loyalty to him. Though uneasy with appellations of divinity, the Emperor was too cunning to let this chance go to waste, and added in several more terms, among which were restrictions against certain types of research, a constraint on the Quest for Knowledge that sat ill with many tech-priests. This agreement was to be sorely tested in later years, and would eventually be irrevocably changed with the advent of the Binary Succession.

The Emperor explained to Ferrus how the accident which took Ferrus away had ruined his private technology stash, which rendered his designs more vulnerable than they otherwise might be. Ferrus swore to aid his father in rectifying this shortcoming, and so the two disembarked on Mars. The primarch was disgusted by grasping and greedy priests of Mars who obsessed over his metal flesh, but tolerated it for his father's sake. He spent several months there, ingratiating himself to the Mechanicum while mastering their sciences, though most were far less advanced than the Emperor's vessel. His superhuman brain effortlessly memorized their schematics, and he was able to aid them in organizing their manufactorums in a more efficient manner to speed up production, a feat for which the tech-priests promised great aid to his legion when the time came.

After leaving the Red Planet, Ferrus next journeyed to Terra, where he met his three older brothers: Horus Lupercal, Leman Russ, and /=][= REDACTED =][=/. Though they were older, Ferrus towered over his siblings; he got along decently well with Horus, and neutrally with Russ, but ultimately did not grow very close with either of them. The Primarch had little patience for politics, and was eager to begin his service to the Emperor. While he mastered the intricacies of Imperial warfare, Ferrus spent a great deal of time laboring in the legendary Forges of Mount Narodnya, crafting suitable armor and weapons for his use. He was incredibly adept in the smithy, shaping and pounding metal with his bare hands to create brutal weapons with cunning hidden features, though the artistry left something to be desired. Within the space of only a few years, he was made ready to join his legion, and so Ferrus met with his sons for the first time. Upon taking command of the Tenth, Ferrus pronounced himself well-pleased with DuCaine's tactics, confirming his status as legion master. However, he did not like much else, and so he took apart his legion with the intent of rebuilding it in his image.

Taking the Tenth with him, Ferrus ordered his sons to impose their will upon the people of Medusa, for strength is all they knew. Thousands of posthuman warriors descended upon Medusa, seizing boys for aspirants and resources for war. When the leaders of the legion returned to orbit to report back to Ferrus, the primarch revealed the price for their rash actions, for carrying out orders without a thought to the consequences or motives. First to go was the legion's structure: if they wished to induct the people of Medusa, they would be like the people of Medusa. Companies and chapters were to be eliminated, replaced by a clan-based structure. Next would be the leadership: DuCaine would retain his position, but his subordinates would now be part of the Iron Council. And finally, for robbing the Medusans of their native language, so too would the legion's name be stripped. The Storm Walkers were no more, and in their place now stood the Iron Hands, a compromise on Ferrus's part to show he was not entirely cruel. He soon regretted his leniency when they began painting their gauntlets silver in imitation of their primarch's arms.

After mustering his legion, Ferrus was awarded command of his own Crusade fleet, and tasked to bring the Emperor's might to the stars. Though he did not know it at the time, Ferrus was receiving a rare honor, for this had not happened with his older brothers. Horus commanded his own fleet, but spent much time combined with the Emperor's own fleet, while Leman Russ preferred to remain under the Emperor's direct command. Ferrus loved his father, but refused to show weakness by begging to stay with him, and so set off on his own. He got along extremely well with DuCaine, their personalities highly compatible, similar to the compatibility between the legion's prior culture and that of Medusa, no doubt because of the forced merger. Thus the legion did not suffer from the personal conflicts or growing pains which plagued many other legions after they reunited with their primarchs. The culture of the legion began to revolve around strength and ruthless efficiency, and the relentlessly utilitarian calculus of war which had begun under DuCaine was taken to new heights.

The legion fought across the width of the galaxy for decades, mostly on their own. This is not to say Ferrus did not get along with his younger brothers, in fact quite the opposite. The next brother to be found was discovered only four years after Ferrus, Jaghatai Khan, who also prized efficiency like Ferrus did; another four years after that, Vulkan was discovered, who too became friends with Ferrus. Despite this, however, Ferrus never grew too close with them, or campaigned with them or any other brothers for any real length of time. He was simply an independent soul at heart, or at least, that's what most assumed about him; his gruff exterior tended to discourage others from asking too many questions. Most primarchs looked up to Ferrus as an older brother, a role model both as a person as well as a commander, for the Iron Hands continued to win victory after victory. However, the real reason is somewhat different. Beneath his rages and seeming hot-headed nature lay an introspective and deeply-worried individual. Ferrus was insecure, constantly worried that people might see through his facade; his caustic barbs and harsh criticism was a defense mechanism, an iron wall to keep others from getting into his head. Even more concerning to the primarch were his arms. His sons seemed almost to worship them, forgetting that there had once been natural flesh underneath. Though he had done his best to halt the practice, many legionaries had severed their own hands, replacing them with bionic replacements and espousing a hideous creed of self-mutilation in the name of self-improvement. Ferrus hated his unnatural flesh, and considered himself weak for allowing the metal flesh to remain for the sake of appearances and utility. Most alarming of all was the realization the corruption seemed to be growing. The living metal had once only covered his lower forearms, but as the years of the Great Crusade rolled on, the taint crept ever higher, though at such a slow rate as to be imperceptible.

As the Crusade progressed, the Iron Hands won the praise and admiration of all their brother legions, and it is said nobody could forget about the Tenth Legion or the genius of their primarch. Meanwhile, Ferrus's anxieties only increased, and he began to improve his armor more and more, burying himself in his work and releasing his frustrations in the forge and on the battlefield. It was during one of these cathartic sessions when Ferrus was laboring in the forge, that a man with sallow skin and long silvery hair entered. After listening to a series of slights about the Lord of the Tenth and the quality of his work, Ferrus laughed in the man's face, knowing this was no doubt one of his brothers, and challenged the man to a contest. With a dramatic sigh, the man accepted, introducing himself as Fulgrim, and he insisted that Ferrus learn his name, for it was the name of the man who would beat him. The two primarchs labored for weeks, insulting each other with good humor as they worked side by side. At the end of the contest, Fulgrim presented his weapon, a massive warhammer, not at all what Ferrus would have expected. For his part, Ferrus had created a beautiful golden sword that glowed with the fires of the forge. Ferrus's insecurities came rushing back as soon as he was no longer engrossed in his work, and he tried to declare Fulgrim's weapon the winner. Yet the other primarch refused to accept it, proclaiming Ferrus the victor, and so the two settled for a tie, sealing their friendship by swapping weapons.

Despite what appeared to be a rocky start, the two primarchs became close friends that day. Though Fulgrim had been found nearly eighty years after him, Ferrus felt as though he could trust him, and confessed his insecurities, or at least a few of them, and Fulgrim did likewise. Their two legions began to work together, and fought as brothers for over a decade, toppling many foes as the Third Legion learned the ways of wars under the masterful guidance of the Tenth. Fulgrim even came up with a nickname for Ferrus, calling him the 'Gorgon' for his dismissive attitude toward the cultures of the worlds they encountered, and the nickname soon spread. However, the demands of the Crusade eventually pulled the two legions apart, though they swore to rejoin when the time was right. After a few years of campaigning on his own again, Ferrus joined his fleet up with that of Vulkan, who was probably his closest brother after Fulgrim. Ferrus and Vulkan had been friends for decades, and had even worked jointly on crafting Vulkan's personal weapon. Yet to Ferrus's surprise, Vulkan was not alone, but was with another brother whom Ferrus had never met, a pale man who called himself Corvus Corax. Ferrus felt the man could see through his bluster, and so he let his guard down a little.

The three primarchs soon became close allies, and Ferrus was well-pleased with the results of their partnership. By utilizing other Astartes as support, the Gorgon no longer had to worry about the constant deaths and losses that usually occurred as a result of his tactics. The Raven Guard proved to be excellent at flushing the enemy out into range of the Iron Hands' heavy firepower, while the Salamanders were far more resilient than the Imperial Army regiments that continued to complain about being assigned to the Tenth. For several decades the three legions fought together, a true model of Imperial efficiency as they brought in world after world to compliance. Ferrus found himself enjoying his brothers' company, as well as his role in the Crusade overall. By this time, rumors had begun to spread that the Emperor was thinking about naming a successor, a warmaster to aid him in administering the ever-growing Great Crusade, and based on Ferrus's status and victory count, many considered him to be in the running.

With the encouragement of Corax and Vulkan, Ferrus departed with his fleet, determined to make one last concerted push to gain the Emperor's attention and approval. It was near the end of the millennium, and so he sought to perform a feat worthy of recognition. The most common foe faced by the various Legiones Astartes were orks, but the Gorgon sought a higher challenge. His wish came true when his astropaths intercepted a call for aid from a region near the Dominion of Storm in Ultima Segmentum. The cry came from the Ultramarines, a rare plea for help from the proud sons of Guilliman, who were engaged against a human civilization known as the Gaardinal. Ferrus respected Guilliman as a tactician, if not as a person, and anything that could force his sons to beg must surely be a threat worthy to face. The Iron Hands set course for that region of space, and swiftly made their way there, and began to assess the situation before announcing their presence. A miniature stellar empire, Gaardinal consisted of eleven worlds, though most had already fallen to the Ultramarines and their attendant Titans of Legio Atarus. Thirteenth Legion vessels hung in high orbit above the industrialized capital world of Gardinaal Prime, and from the auspex readings, it appeared they had tried to force a landing. When Ferrus contacted the Ultramarines commander, he told a tale of slaughter at the hands of technologically advanced foes, of a half million dead Imperial Army soldiers and the loss of half a demi-legio. Though irritated by such waste, Ferrus swore to aid the Ultramarines, and his legion joined the battle.

Utilizing the remaining Ultramarines as a diversion, the Iron Hands hit Gaardinal from a thousand places at once. With control in orbit, it was easy for the Tenth to land their heavy armor, and mechanized columns began to muster outside of every major city. Reams of tactical data began to flow into legion cogitators, which began to analyze and plot out the optimal course of action, and of the weakest points in the enemy defenses. Within two weeks, Ferrus had the data he needed, gained at great price by feeding the Ultramarines into unwinnable scenarios to gain the knowledge he sought. Finally, he gave the order to strike, and within a day, the Gaardinal were begging to surrender, but the Gorgon would not relent. The various Clan-Companies of the Tenth began to compete with each other, striving to outdo their brothers in order to gain their father's attention, who remained in his command center and did not join the battle. The slaughter was immense, though only in terms of lives: Ferrus had given strict orders to leave the world's infrastructure as intact as possible.

Within one week, a reinforcement fleet led by Roboute Guilliman had arrived, only to find Gaardinal in the grip of Ferrus's Iron Hands. Without a word, the Gorgon passed over control of the world to the Ultramarines, departing with his fleet. By all accounts, the Iron Hands had performed admirably, as always. Why, then, did Ferrus feel like they had lost? The primarch's temper continued to fray as the weeks passed, even after he had rejoined Vulkan and Corax. News soon came that the Emperor had named Horus Lupercal as Warmaster, a stroke of luck which allowed the Gorgon to pass off his rage as stemming from that. To be honest, he did not even want to be Warmaster anymore. Almost two hundred years of bloodshed, of the excessive cruelties required from a man in his position, were beginning to wear at him. He was master of one of the most successful legions, yet his victories had been bought by the deaths of others, while Ferrus himself seemed to always walk away without a scratch. Worse still, his sons did not even begin to understand his survivor's guilt, always interpreting his anger as criticism of their performance, which only led them to further mutilate themselves and draw ever closer to paternal worship.

Feeling that his brothers would not understand, Ferrus separated his fleets from theirs, and Corax and Vulkan went their separate ways. He remained secluded for several months, turning over command of the legion to DuCaine once more. He left his legion behind, traveling to Ullanor to pay fealty to Horus and assure him of his loyalty. Ferrus hid his emotions once more, feigning a gruff acceptance and congratulating the new Warmaster before departing once more. The Warmaster asked for a delegation of his sons to join a new project he was sponsoring known as the Legion Auxilia, and Ferrus gladly acquiesced, eager to show the Warmaster that he did not begrudge him for his new title. Before he left, Horus informed Ferrus that the Emperor was calling a council to rule on the question of psykers in the legions. Ferrus had never trusted psykers, but they were undeniably useful, and so he had permitted a Librarius to exist within his legion, though it always remained under close oversight from the Iron Fathers.

Iron Fathers

The position of Iron Father can best be described as a fusion between techmarine and spiritual advisor. The role has its origins in the enginseer-mystics of Medusa, who maintained the machinery of each Medusan clan. When the legion merged with the people of Ferrus's homeworld, the techmarines willingly joined themselves with these mystics, learning the lore and inducting those young enough to become Astartes. The Iron Fathers are treated as officers, and assist the apothecaries in inducting new recruits, overseeing the bionic augmentations that each Iron Hand receives. It is they who have encouraged the hatred of flesh so prevalent in the legion, and their influence is far-reaching. No Warrior Lodge ever gained a foothold in the Iron Tenth as a result of their vigil, and the Librarius was deliberately controlled under their watch.

Ferrus had no interest in attending the Council, and instead attempted to return to Vulkan and Corax. However, he soon learned this would be impossible. Corax had moved his forces further out to the Ghoul Stars to prosecute a campaign there, while Vulkan had sent word that he had been appointed as Praetorian of Terra and that his legion was withdrawing from the Crusade. After sending a message to Corax updating him on the state of affairs, Ferrus secluded himself, leaving DuCaine in charge while he thought things through. Life seemed to be slipping from his grasp like dust through his fingers, and he longed for the simplicity of the early Great Crusade, back when he was one of three Crusade fleets instead of one in four thousand. It was in this emotional turmoil that he found himself approached by a brother he had not seen in quite some time: Lion El'Jonson.

The Lord of the Dark Angels arrived with but a single ship, but accompanying him was a fleet of Emperor's Children. Ferrus met with the Lion first, whose speech seemed altered and strange, even compared to his usual reticence. It seemed like he was hinting at something, that he expected some kind of sign from the Gorgon, but Ferrus had no idea what he was talking about, and the Lion soon left, clearly frustrated. After he departed, Ferrus met with Fulgrim, who seemed much the same as ever. The Third and the Tenth merged their fleets once more, and Ferrus threw himself into battles, seeking to bury these troubles of the past once more. His plan seemed to work, and the Gorgon and the Phoenician were as close as ever, fighting vile Aeldari and crushing a pitiful human empire known as the Auretian Technocracy with alacrity.

The Lie of Iron: The Martian Wars

For nearly ten years, Ferrus was happy once more, the talk of Warmasters and politics forgotten as he and Fulgrim and their respective legions fought together as brothers. However, as the years passed, Fulgrim seemed to grow more and more distracted, as though he were waiting for something, and his usual resignation outside of battles seemed almost forced. However, it was not interfering with their fraternal relationship, and so the Gorgon never bothered to ask him what was going on, though in later years, he surely wished he had. In 011.M31, Fulgrim departed abruptly, taking his legion with him and leaving Ferrus puzzled and annoyed. He attempted to follow Fulgrim, but after a year or so it proved impossible: the storms in the Immaterium had grown worse of late, and so the astropaths could not find the Third Legion's trail.

It was while debating his next move when Ferrus received an urgent communication from Vulkan, summoning him and the full might of his legion back to Terra. Unlike other legions, the Iron Hands were fairly spread out across the galaxy, for each clan-company was given great leeway in choosing their deployments, though they were still required to remain in contact. Thus it took the better part of several months to gather the legion as the message was routed across the entire galaxy, and many clan-companies indicated they would be unable to come immediately, including the forces led by Shadrak Meduson who were attached to the Warmaster's Legion Auxilia. Ferrus however could not afford to wait, for the summons seemed urgent. After nearly half the legion was assembled, some fifty thousand Astartes total, the Iron Hands departed for Terra, bulling their way through the relentless storms to finally arrive at Terra just under a year after Vulkan's message had been sent.

Though such delays were unavoidable, they were not without cost. The original reason the Iron Hands had been summoned was so that they could deal with the unthinkable: the Thousand Sons had gone rogue. When a Word Bearers delegation brought news of Nikaea over ten years ago, the Gorgon had obeyed and disbanded his Librarius with little afterthought, focusing instead on sending his congratulations to Vulkan for being named Praetorian. He had been on neutral terms with Magnus, annoyed at his pretensions though respecting him for his power, but duty was duty, and so Ferrus would bring him in. But before he could leave, Vulkan stopped him, telling the Gorgon he was required elsewhere. Whilst the Iron Hands had been en route, Mars had been seized in the fires of rebellion, the origins of which were still unknown. The Tenth were to put down the rebellion by any means necessary, and retake the Forge World Principal with the support of the loyalist Mechanicum and their leader, Kelbor-Hal. Ferrus had never trusted Hal, and so he sent Legion Master DuCaine and several companies to scope out the situation while he met with the Fabricator General.

Fabricator General Kelbor-Hal

The de jure head of the Mechanicum of Mars, the role of Fabricator General was once a religious title. Each Forge World possessed such a leader, but as Holy Mars is the Forge World Principal, its leader was the leading representative of the Machine-God, while secular matters were decided by the Martian Parliament. When the Emperor signed the Treaty of Mars, he had no wish to rule by committee, and insisted the Parliament elect a leader who would have the authority to make the necessary decisions required of an endeavor such as the Great Crusade. The spiritual head of the Machine Cult seemed as good a choice as any, and so for over two hundred years now, the Fabricator General has represented the interests of all Forge Worlds on the War Council of Terra.

As of the 31st Millennium, the current Fabricator General was an ambitious Magos by the name of Kelbor-Hal. Master of the Forges of Olympus Mons, Hal attained his ascendancy through vicious power politics, along with the support of Horus Lupercal, whom he seemed to prefer even more than the Emperor. The Fabricator General held neutral to positive feelings on other primarchs, including Ferrus Manus and Vulkan, and so when his initial efforts at quelling a rebellion failed, he was forced to flee Mars and seek the Imperium's aid in retaking his domain.

Ferrus met with the Fabricator General within the Imperial Palace, listening with disbelief to tales of waves of scrapcode and rebellion, of two-thirds of the Mechanicum breaking out into schism against Hal's authority. It had begun as discontent in the lower ranks, of strikes and sabotages which began to escalate after a rumor that the Warmaster had perished swept the system. Though only partially true, it seemed to galvanize the nascent rebellion, and several weeks after the Warmaster had left Terra, armed conflict broke out between the rival forges of Mars. The architect of this rebellion seemed to be Fabricator Locum Zagreus Kane, Hal's de facto successor, who had declared the formation of the 'New Mechanicum', and had changed their robes from red to black. Ferrus had never liked Hal, who came off as arrogant and grasping, but duty was duty, and so he pledged his aid, if not his obedience, to the Fabricator General's cause. To the Gorgon's annoyance, the Fabricator General seemed to lack an army, and when pressed about it, told Ferrus to take it up with Vulkan, saying only that the Praetorian had sworn him to secrecy.

After failing to get answers out of Vulkan, Ferrus returned to his legion, and together they transited the forty million miles between the two worlds, and landed in force near Olympus Mons, where the forces of the Fabricator General had held out for nearly eight months against Dark Mechanicum forces. The entire world seemed on the verge of collapse: devastating plagues of scrapcode had swept the planet, isolating every forge who were forced to cut off communication lest they be infected. Vast explosions flattened the forges of many who had not been able to isolate themselves in time, while turning others to madness. To the east of Olympus Mons, the Magma City of Adept Zeth and Mondus Occulum of Fabricator Locum Kane had risen in rebellion, and had moved to siege Mondus Gamma, where the loyal Adept Lukas Chrom still remained. To the south, the traitorous titans of Legio Tempestus from Ascraeus Mons had launched a deadly ambush and laid siege to Legio Mortis at their forge underneath Pavonis Mons. The Forge World Principal was in utter chaos, but these were the kind of harsh times that made strong men, and none were stronger than the Iron Tenth.

The Iron Hands began to deploy in the vicinity of Olympus Mons in the region of Tharsis. Though they had nominal aerial supremacy, the demands of politics stayed their hands: Hal refused to countenance orbital bombardment, and so a land war would be necessary. DuCaine had struck first, moving his forces straight towards Mondus Occulum as he sought to cut off the head of the snake. His forces had battled against corrupted swarms of skitarii, taking light casualties as they cut through the enemy. When Ferrus arrived with the rest of the legion, DuCaine was in the midst of storming the Forge Temple, and was nearing the inner halls where Kane was reputed to be hiding.

"We've got them on the ropes, sire. We've raised the bloody storm, and this rebellion should be over soon." DuCaine shouted into his vox-caster. The Primarch himself was hundreds of kilometers away, overseeing the legion's deployment, but he was watching through the unblinking eyes of the Forge Temple's security network, which had been seized back. Ferrus, along with the Fabricator General, who had accompanied him here, watched impassively as DuCaine and his men breached the final doors of the inner sanctum. Scuttling mechanical horrors hurled themselves out through the dust at the Iron Hands, killing and being killed in turn. Within a minute though, only the Iron Hands were left standing. DuCaine advanced cautiously into the room, coming to stand over a prone mass of mechadendrites.

"Target identified as Fabricator Locum Zagreus Kane. He's dead, sire. His bionics look like they were cannibalized. I suggest…" DuCaine's last words were cut off by an agonized scream, which Ferrus realized had come from the legion master himself. A directed energy wave had struck DuCaine from behind, melting a hole a meter in diameter through his lower torso; similar screams of pain were elicited from the other Iron Hands as they fell swiftly to this unseen assailant. The hiss of static began to warp the hololith image as a being wreathed in scrapcode and corruption scuttled over to the prone body of DuCaine. Ferrus could only watch as the hololith shifted into temporary clarity, revealing the figure to be what looked like an Archmagos, whose arms clicked and shuttered as they unveiled an Arc Scourge, eliciting further screams from the fallen legion master.

Even as DuCaine fell into unconsciousness, the fallen Archmagos hunched over, jamming his mechadendrites into the Astartes's skull, flaying the skin and cracking the bone to get at the bionic implants and brain contained within. Ferrus seethed with rage at this desecration, but the gruesome deed was over within a minute. He turned to the Fabricator General, who stood silently beside him.

"What is that freak, Hal? What murdered my sons?" Ferrus demanded. Hal turned to regard him, and when he spoke, the Gorgon could tell that despite his extensive augmentation, Hal was struggling to contain rage and fear in equal measure.

"That…freak…is Belisarius Cawl."

The death of Amadeus DuCaine at the hands of Belisarius Cawl turned what should have been a swift campaign into a war of attrition. By murdering Kane, Cawl had gained his command codes, and swiftly assumed control over the disparate Dark Mechanicum forces and turned them towards his own dark designs. The Heretek Supreme had used foul mnemo-science to steal DuCaine's memories, in the process gaining the Iron Hands' entire repertoire of strategies, which he was able to use to deadly effect against the unprepared Tenth. The Iron Hands were pushed back across the theater back towards Olympus Mons, and many called for a full retreat, but Ferrus refused. Thus the campaign became a protracted, grueling affair, and thousands of Iron Hands began to perish alongside their loyal Mechanicum allies. Though Cawl had DuCaine's knowledge and superior numbers, Ferrus Manus was a primarch, whose tactics were far above even those of DuCaine, and soon seized the initiative.

Five years of war is difficult for any planet to endure, and Mars was no exception. Its forges starved as all resources shut down, and so the battles became infantry affairs, kill teams stalking each other through the dense cover offered by the mechanical terrain. Many times did Ferrus take the field, seeking to hunt down Cawl and take revenge for his son's death by slaying the monster personally, but Cawl proved elusive, sending abominable intelligences bearing his likeness to taunt the Gorgon. The greater war engines such as titans remained secluded within their forges, only unleashed when the fall of a fortress seemed imminent. The advantage tipped back and forth as new forces arrived: new Iron Hands fleets soon made landfall, replacing the fallen and swelling the legion's numbers. Yet this proved short-lived, for a new foe made themselves known: the Ultramarines. The scions of Guilliman had shown up across Mars one day, tens of thousands scattered across the entire world, including far behind friendly lines, and reaped a bloody slaughter. The Ultramarines were daubed in hideous symbols, and they took particular delight in desecrating the bodies of the fallen. Though the lines of battle constantly shifted, the battlefields themselves had a tendency to stay the same. Certain regions were simply too valuable to give up, and so the two legions clashed against each other in a constant struggle. Both were highly mechanized, and the dust fields proved the ideal ground for running tank battles, while high overhead, breacher teams and shield walls dueled in the tight confines of the Ring of Iron that floated serenely in orbit.

Though far deadlier than the skitarii and other Dark Mechanicum forces, the Ultramarines were still no match for the inspired tactics of Ferrus Manus, who utilized his superior numbers of Astartes to pin the traitors into ever-smaller pockets. By this time, the Leonine Heresy had erupted throughout the galaxy, and Ferrus seethed as he remained trapped on Mars, struggling to hurry along the siege to a point where he could afford to leave and join his brothers in fighting the traitors. Ferrus now realized that the Lion had been attempting to sway him to his cause all those years ago, and his rage was truly apoplectic when he heard the news that Fulgrim had turned traitor. The Iron Hands redoubled their efforts, and by 018.M31, Mars had mostly been retaken as the remaining traitors were forced underground in their few remaining fortresses. The forges of Mars began to burn with the fires of industry once more, churning out arms and ammunition to be stockpiled on Terra for the upcoming Siege.

Titandeath: The Battle of Beta-Garmon

The Iron Hands had suffered heavily during the Martian Wars, losing thirty thousand Astartes in five years. However, despite these losses, the Iron Hands at Mars were still nearly sixty thousand strong, which made them one of the larger legions compared to others such as the Death Guard or Space Wolves. Throughout the war, Ferrus had periodically traveled back to Terra, aiding Vulkan in managing the defensive front known as Bastion Omega, which had slowed the traitors down for over five years now. These expeditions were taken out of necessity, for the traitors pressed in on all sides. Yet the Martian campaign suffered during his absences: despite how far they had fallen, the Ultramarines were still incredibly adaptable and powerful warriors, and had killed many alongside the endless swarms of their Dark Mechanicum allies. Nonetheless they were eventually forced back, and with Mars retaken, the loyalists now had a powerful arsenal to supply their efforts.

Despite the bulk of the legion being on Mars, there still remained Tenth Legion forces elsewhere in the galaxy. Nearly twenty thousand Astartes had been assigned to or had mustered around Medusa, for in galactic terms, the legion homeworld was incredibly close to Caliban and the Eye of Terror, and would surely make a tempting target if not properly defended. In addition, many battle groups had been unable to reach Terra due to the ever-worsening Warp storms, instead electing to pursue the traitors or reinforce their homeworld. The largest of these was Clan Morragul, led by the infamous Autek Mor.

Autek Mor, the Blood-Wrought

Few Astartes of any legion would dare to openly defy a primarch, let alone their own, but Autek Mor was one of these rare exceptions. The Iron Lord of Clan Morragul held a sinister reputation as a man willing to kill his own brothers over minor slights, and was one of the few Terran legionaries to have survived to the days of the Heresy. Clan Morragul had long been seen as a dumping ground for 'problem' legionaries, and it is said Mor was more of a prison warden than a commander. When the Iron Hands were called back to Terra by order of the Praetorian, Mor was intentionally left out of the muster, and received information only as an afterthought. When the Blood-Wrought learned that nine legions had turned their back upon the Emperor, it is said he only smiled.

Mor's fleet, centered around his flagship the Red Talon, rejected the idea of bleeding the traitors by a thousand cuts, instead preferring to reap bloody vengeance upon worlds that submitted willingly to Lion El'Jonson. Dozens of worlds across the northern Imperium fell to his bloody onslaught in a campaign of blood and fire so unlike the resistance offered by other legions. The high point of this crusade of vengeance came with the destruction of the World Eaters recruitment world of Bodt in 019.M31. By utilizing nearly the entire stockpile of his fleet's void ordnance, Mor knocked Bodt's moon out of orbit, sending it crashing into the Twelfth Legion's world with apocalyptic force, killing the entire population, the World Eaters garrison, as well as an entire Titan legio in one fell swoop.

By leaving behind a five thousand strong garrison to maintain the siege of Mars, the Red Planet was as secure as it would ever be, and so the Iron Hands moved out to reinforce their brother legions. Over the past few years, the Sixth, Fourteenth, and Sixteenth legions had borne the brunt of the fighting, while the Eighth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth had struck at the Lion's flanks. While the arrival of the Iron Hands definitely helped slow the tide of traitors, it could not turn it, for by 019.M31, it was all but certain the Lion's forces would break through at some point. However, Vulkan's defenses were still not quite ready, and nor were the Word Bearers close to reaching Terra. Thus a certain level of sacrifice could not be helped: the traitors needed to be slowed down, no matter the cost.

By comparing the traitor legion advances to the major warp currents of Segmentum Solar, Ferrus and his fellow primarchs were able to deduce the most likely locations that the major assaults would fall. The Verzagen system was highly obvious, for the triple stars of Alpha Centauri held great symbolic value, and the Lion would need it both for its Warp-current nexus as well as to legitimize his rule. The obdurate Death Guard and deadly Space Wolves were thus dispatched to hold this vital system. Another likely route would be the Trisolian System, whose forge worlds would give the traitors supplies and munitions that would be needed for a siege of Terra. To its defense marched the Warmaster himself and his sons. That left but one final route, which fell to the Iron Hands to defend: the Beta-Garmon Cluster. Consisting of thirty worlds plus dozens more moons of various sizes and classifications, the Cluster had been an ongoing battle for nearly three years now, for its rich resources were a tempting prize to any, and its Warp-routes were highly charted, the perfect target for invasion.

Despite its obvious value, Beta-Garmon had not seen any significant Astartes presence, instead being the site of a brutal civil war amongst Imperial Army and Mechanicum forces. Both sides had slowly fed forces into the meat-grinder, using it almost as a proxy conflict in the hopes that it would resolve itself without legion intervention. However, with the traitors pressing in on all sides, it could no longer be left to chance, and so Ferrus Manus and his legion assaulted the system with the force of a hammer striking an anvil. At their side was a staggering twenty-seven different Titan Legios, the vast majority of the god-engines still loyal to the Master of Mankind. Such firepower would have only been a liability upon Terra, and so Vulkan had decreed they be unleashed elsewhere. Titans of all descriptions, from the largest Imperators to packs of loping Warhounds, began to stride the dust bowl plains of Beta Garmon II, while other Imperial forces including the Iron Hands began to drive back the traitors already present.

Such a gathering of force is hard to keep hidden, and the traitors soon took notice, deploying their own god-engines to counter them. Maniple clashed with maniple, demi-legio with demi-legio, as metal giants fought in such numbers as had never before been seen, nor seen since. Titans were meant to deploy in small numbers, for even a single engine was enough to win most battles, yet here they fought as infantry, and died in droves as burning scrap covered the surface of Beta-Garmon II. Around their feet and in their shadows, mortals struggled and died in countless swarms, a battle separate yet intimately connected with the clash of the Titans taking place above them. The bright flashes of reactor overload lit up the skies, visible even from orbit, where the Imperial and Traitor fleets stared each other down as they prevented each other from interfering in the battle below. Days turned into weeks turned into months as the Titandeath dragged ever onward. No system was worth such a colossally wasteful expenditure, for it seemed as though all of humanity's god-engines would be lost in one fell swoop. The hive cities and forges they were ostensibly protecting had been reduced to empty husks long before, and they held no practical value. This was a war of the most senseless variety, satisfying only the pride of commanders and empty of any other redeeming quality.

Yet even as the god-engines dueled, other wars were taking place in the Cluster. The Iron Hands lacked the troops to garrison every world, and so many of the outlying systems fell to the traitor legions who had accompanied their Titan allies. Forces of multiple traitor legions had been spotted, from the debased Ultramarines to the savage Blood Angels to the mutated World Eaters, and the outlying worlds of the Cluster fell one by one even as the Titandeath dragged on and on at Beta-Garmon II. However, few of these legions ever directly assaulted the main concentration of Iron Hands, who had made their primary battlefield the chemical wastelands of Beta-Garmon III. Accompanying the Tenth Legion were forces of the loyal Legio Vulpa, whose aggressive tactics had been effective against the Traitor Army regiments assaulting the world. Beta-Garmon III's primary value lay with the Carthega Telepathica or Diviner's Needle, an Astropathic Temple the size of a hive, that served as one of the primary communications hubs for messages coming in and out from the Solar System. If the Needle fell, then Terra would be all but blind to its forces out in the wider galaxy.

When Ferrus had arrived in the Cluster months earlier, his first order of business had been to subordinate the disparate forces already present into a strict hierarchy under his command. His brutal and straightforward approach had caused a great deal of resentment, but none dared to disobey a primarch, and so when the traitors began to arrive, they paid a heavy price. The Great Ironfather had long been reputed as straightforward, a man of simple tactics whose plans began and ended with the concept of attacking, but they did not know Ferrus at all. It was not for nothing he had once been in command of a third of the Imperial Crusade forces. The arrogant traitors had held the advantage and been on the offensive for most of this war, and so they had sailed blindly in, expecting a demoralized foe and an easy victory. They were dead wrong. Trap after trap sprung on the unready heretics as the Iron Hands struck them again and again from all sides, for the Tenth knew every inch of the space around Beta-Garmon III. Ferrus himself moved from battle to battle as a mobile reserve, his mighty flagship Fist of Iron striking like its namesake as they broke the traitors beneath them. Yet despite their many victories, the loyalists were losing. The Titandeath had turned against them, for there were far more traitor Legios than loyal ones, while the traitor Astartes had seized most of the outlying systems in preparation for a final push.

The beginning of the end came with the arrival of the Iron Warriors legion. Perturabo's dread reputation swiftly established order, and the traitors began to attack with much greater coherency. Forces of the Fourth Legion soon landed upon Beta-Garmon III itself alongside nearly fifty fresh titans of Legio Solaria, and the Iron Hands began to die in far greater numbers than they had before. While Legio Vulpa clashed with their rivals, the War of Iron began outside the Needle as the Fourth and Tenth Legions battled for supremacy. The two had long been rivals, a friendly competition between the two over which better deserved the title of Iron in their name. It had now since turned to bitter hatred, and the two reaped a bloody slaughter upon each other. Ferrus's sons were soon forced back into the Needle itself, their defensive advantage negated by the Iron Warrior's expertise at siegecraft. It is said five sons of Perturabo fell for every one Iron Hands, but it mattered not, for the Iron Warriors far outnumbered their opponents. Neither Ferrus nor Perturabo took the field throughout the battle, for this was a struggle between generals, a contest far higher than the brawls that their brothers were more accustomed to.

The end of the Beta-Garmon campaign came to an end abruptly in a manner not suited to the drawn-out conflict that had preceded it. As the Titandeath continued outside the walls of Nyrcon City, the largest hive upon Beta-Garmon II, Iron Warrior infiltrators had breached the city's walls, entering the massive fortress known as the Anvil, and overloaded its reactors. The resultant explosion had leveled the city and destroyed everything for miles around. Outside the crater, the corpses of hundreds of god-engines from both sides lay shattered and broken. Never again would the Titans walk in such great numbers, and estimates place the cost of these losses as exceeding the last five years of the entire Great Crusade. On Beta-Garmon III, Perturabo had played his final card as eight daemon-possessed titans took the field alongside the remainder of Legio Solaria, and together they broke the final titans of Legio Vulpa, who were forced to fall back in utter disarray. With the last of the titans gone, the Iron Warriors were able to move in close enough to unleash their heaviest siege guns, shattering the Needle as billions of tons of rubble and steel came crashing down around them. The death of the Choir within the Temple, nearly a thousand Astropaths total, unleashed a massive Warp-storm across the Warp-routes of Beta-Garmon.

Ferrus had long known victory was all but impossible to obtain at Beta-Garmon, but he had not expected defeat to taste so bitter. Nearly forty thousand Iron Hands had perished in under a year, nearly a quarter more than had died over five years of fighting on Mars. Barely fifteen thousand Iron Hands fell back in disarray from Beta-Garmon, escaping to Terra with what few titans had managed to both survive and escape. As the Temple fell, Ferrus was able to relay one final message to appraise Vulkan of the situation, as well as inform Horus at Trisolian and Mortarion at Verzagen lest they be cut off from Terra as the Warp-storms intensified. The Iron Hands fell back to Mars, and began to reinforce the Forge World Principal, for the traitors would no doubt come to retake the Red Planet once more. Ferrus met with Vulkan, alongside their other brothers, and together they finalized the defensive plans in preparation for the Lion and his traitor kin to arrive.

The Fourth Sphere: The Second Invasion of Mars

Despite the fact information from the wider galaxy had long been suppressed even before the destruction of the Carthega Telepathica, Ferrus had little doubt that the traitors on Mars would manage to hear of their allies' victories, and his pessimistic hypothesis soon proved true. Across the Red Planet, the traitors began to sally out, throwing themselves headlong against the loyalist contravallations. Though each such attempt was repulsed with increasingly high casualties, it tied down a now-significant portion of the Iron Hands legion, who were forced to remain on the defensive instead of getting the rest and preparation time they so desperately needed. Though their primarch had long sought to de-emphasize the use of bionics and other mechanical upgrades, the Tenth Legion on Mars felt they had little choice, and continued to surreptitiously upgrade themselves far from their primarch's eyes.

Based on Malcador's calculations, the traitors would arrive by the new year, and so when the Regent's prognostications came to pass, the Iron Tenth were ready. Using highly advanced cogitators of Vulkan and Ferrus's design, the Fourth Sphere defense fleet were able to calculate pre-sighted bombardment zones, and began to fire their energy-based weapons across the billions of kilometers toward the Elysian Gate, the closer of the two primary Warp Gates that the traitors were even now pouring through. Normally such long range shots would have an infinitesimal chance to hit, but such weapons required essentially no ammo, and so long as Mortarion's forces held them at their beachhead, the shots stood a much higher chance to hit. Though it took the weapons just under three hours to travel the distance, the void of space meant the energy would have little chance to diffuse, and so many traitor ships found themselves struck unexpectedly. It was a slight advantage, but everything was necessary to repel the Lion's forces, for they vastly outnumbered the beleaguered defenders.

As Mortarion's forces at Uranus began to be pushed back, this tactic lost its efficacy, and so the Iron Hands fleet waited their turn. They watched with burning impatience and mounting anger as the first three Defense Spheres fell one by one. When the vast Warp rift opened within the Great Red Spot, they were able to employ the tactic once more as their weapons took less than half an hour to close the gap, though only for a short time as Jupiter's rotational velocity meant the traitor beachhead soon moved out of their range. As the traitor armada neared, these shots only became more accurate, though the return fire proved severe as thousands of ships took passing broadsides as they sailed past the Forge World Principal on their way towards Terra. Nonetheless, hundreds of traitor vessels peeled off towards Mars, principally the gaudy vessels bearing the insignia of the Ultramarines, alongside the heretek forge-fleets of the Dark Mechanicum.

The Iron Hands were hard-pressed to defend against such an unholy alliance, for their foes were not bound by the laws of reality, wreathed in the dark powers of their patrons and unshackled from the Emperor's decrees. The Tenth Legion's orderly gunline soon descended into chaos as the traitorous Ultramarines hurled themselves at the sons of Ferrus with the same reckless abandon as their traitorous kin trapped below. In contrast, the Dark Mechanicum's fleet bypassed the Tenth's section of the blockade entirely, instead moving to clash with the few Adeptus Mechanicus vessels that manned the perimeter alongside the Ring of Iron and the Tenth Legion. The Iron Hands felt nothing but smoldering rage for their foes, a burning resentment for those that had turned their backs on the Emperor's light. As the battle dragged on, even those who had long since replaced their flesh with iron began to feel the anger and hate grow, their dispassionate calm shifting to white hot rage.

For seven long years, the Iron Hands had repressed their emotions. Though the loyal techpriests of the Mechanicum had been their allies, there was no love lost between the two factions. With Vulkan occupied overseeing the defenses of Terra, it was Ferrus's job to maintain relations with the Martians, an utterly thankless task. The priests of Mars were petty and bickering, using the Heresy as an opportunity to upstage their rivals and seize power and land like the feudal lords of old. Despite their claims to be beyond the weaknesses of the flesh, they were all too human, and for that the Iron Hands despised them. And the Titan princeps were worse, for their arrogance loomed as large as their god-engines. Their constant posturing had forced Ferrus to intervene, brokering a solution known as the Binary Succession which saw the Mechanicum transform into the Adeptus Mechanicus, loyalty purchased for influence. Such seemingly trivial matters had threatened to undo the Throneworld's defenses, and had kept Ferrus playing politics instead of acting as a general, as a warrior.

Well no more. The Gorgon's fury was now unleashed. Many saw the Iron Hands as cold and unfeeling as their namesake, but such impressions were only skin-deep. The Tenth positively burned with fury, a white-hot rage as incandescent as melting steel. Even from the earliest days, when the legion was composed of recruits from Solus Stellax instead of Medusa, the Tenth struggled to contain their tempers, refusing to let slip their iron control in the presence of their allies. The arrival of the Dark Mechanicum had now given them an outlet for this rage, and so the Iron Hands marched to war one final time in defense of Mars. Mechanized battalions blitzed into the landing zones of the Ultramarines with the fury of the Blood Angels and speed worthy of a Star Hunter. The Thirteenth had little time to react as black-armored warriors spilled out, already firing their bolters at pre-cogitated targets before closing to hack their foes to pieces in melee. Up in orbit, Tenth legion vessels that were in full retreat suddenly pivoted, ventral thrusters rocketing them 180° into position to unleash devastating salvos into their unready foes. The Fist of Iron, the legion flagship, was an unbreakable anvil anchoring the defensive line, a slab of steel and bronze that shrugged off every shot hurled at it.

Yet for all this rage, the outcome was never in doubt. For three long weeks, the Iron Hands battled foes whose numbers far outstripped their own. The Heretek Supreme Belisarius Cawl had returned to the battlefield from beneath the surface of the Red Planet where he had been forced to retreat. At his side were the Ultramarines who had initially accompanied him, clad in armor of Cawl's own design and wielding blasphemous weaponry as they towered over their newly-arrived brethren. The Ultramarines may have thrown aside their legendary discipline in pursuit of excess, but their deadly adaptability remained, bolstered by unholy pacts with daemonic forces and Cawl's ministrations. The machine-warriors of the Dark Mechanicum were equally horrifying: now set free from the chains of Martian dogma, their constructs were uncannily effective. Scuttling machine-horrors of all descriptions were hurled from orbit into the Martian deserts, where they arose from craters to march on every forge-temple at once. Both sides emptied their vaults, utilizing weapons from the Dark Age of Technology, weapons of unimaginable potency that bypassed even the stoutest void shield or refractor field. Many of the ruling priesthood chose to detonate their forges rather than see them fall into traitor hands, and the Red Planet slowly died around them as the forces were corralled into smaller and smaller battlefields until just Olympus Mons remained. The Gorgon and the Fabricator-General fought side by side on the slopes of the Grand Mountain as they protected the Temple City within.

"Assertion: it is time for you to go." Hal canted to Ferrus in between swings of his titanic Omnissian Axe. The Fabricator-General towered over Ferrus as he buried Forgebreaker in the twisted metal of what had once been a skitarii marshal. Hal had upgraded himself many times over the years of the Heresy, and was now a mechanical construct the size of a Questoris knight, what remained of his mortal flesh contained somewhere within the metal warframe.

"Even if I wanted to, there's no way off this rock. We're surrounded." Ferrus grunted back. As if to prove his point, the braying horns of a Titan legion echoed over the clamor of battle, their arrival imminent based on the red dust-clouds rolling towards Olympus Mons from behind the endless sea of traitors that surrounded the mountain on all sides.

"Negatory. A cursory evaluation of traitor capabilities indicates a distinct tactical deficiency, one that will not be altered with/without your presence/attendance/aid. Optimal course of action: determined. Farewell, Ferrus Manus. Return to Terra. Be good/victorious." As the Gorgon turned to see what Hal meant, he felt the tell-tale nausea of being pulled through the Warp. The bastard was teleporting him, using himself as the power source, and Ferrus could only watch during the brief few seconds remaining to him before the miniature Warp-rift pulled him away entirely. The last thing he saw was the Fabricator-General crushing the traitors that beset him on all sides, until that vision was replaced with the familiar sight of his teleportarium on the Fist of Iron.

Accompanied by a score of its lesser kin, the Fist of Iron limped away from Mars, ceding control to the traitors. The battleship was covered in scars, for while Ferrus had fought the Ultramarines on the surface, the flagship had dueled with its Thirteenth Legion counterpart, an affront to decency known as the Macragge's Honour. Yet their foe seemed content to let them escape, engaged as they were consolidating their hold over Mars once more. The Iron Hands fled into the darkness of space, barely ten thousand Astartes remaining. Their duty was clear: Terra must be reinforced. However, while they had been occupied on Mars, the vast majority of the traitors had long since moved on to Terra, and their fleets covered Terra like flies on a corpse. Thus the Tenth were forced to remain away, waiting for an opportunity to join the battle without instantly being shot down. As they waited, they established contact with the Word Bearers, Lorgar's astropathic shouts piercing the storms that girded the warp around the Solar System. They were tidings of hope, for help was only weeks away. However, Terra did not have weeks, and so the Iron Hands were resolved to keep the Imperium in the fight, no matter the cost.

Siege of Terra: The Gorgon and the Phoenician

The remaining Iron Hands vessels fell back to Saturn, taking refuge in the strange storms that shrouded the ringworld. The legion had prepared multiple fleet muster points there, and even before the traitors had reached Mars, the sons of Ferrus had engaged them from their sheltered positions within the storm, which punished any traitors who attempted to pursue them. Now the fleet gathered there once more alongside the remnants of Battlefleet Solar as their auspexes picked up incredible surges of energy from within the storm itself, though not even Ferrus knew their source. For two long months, the Iron Hands waited, their simmering hatred cooling to a fury subsumed beneath an icy facade. They reestablished iron control over their emotions, hidden from traitors and allies alike as they patiently waited for their primarch's command to strike.

By the start of Quintus, Ferrus judged the time to strike had come once more, and so the sons of Medusa prepared to march to war. At the head of the procession was the Fist of Iron, nearly crippled yet still proud, with all power given to engines as it rocketed towards the swarming mass of traitor warships infesting the skies above Terra. There were no Astartes aboard the doomed vessel, only a brave mortal crew, whose willing sacrifice touched even the cold hearts of the legionaries trailing behind the flagship in their own transports. Nor were there any other Astartes vessels present, for they remained with the rest of the fleet in preparation for the Word Bearers' arrival, estimated to come within a month.

Mark VI Armor and Reflex Shields

Though many saw the Tenth Legion and its primarch as blunt weapons, useful only for destruction, they were dead wrong. Love of creation and forge-craft equal to that of a Salamander lurked in the hearts of all of Ferrus's sons, and their tactical minds were willing to entertain almost any method in pursuit of victory. For many years, the Iron Hands had fought alongside the Raven Guard, and had noted and incorporated their tactics into their own. When Ferrus learned of Corvus's death, he swore to forever keep his brother in his memory, and so labored alongside the priests of Mars and the sons of Vulkan to craft the MK VI power armor, the so-called Corvus pattern which was distinctive for its beak-like helm containing advanced sensor equipment.

By the time of the Solar War, the Iron Hands had the greatest amount of these suits as a result of their time on Mars. Yet this was not the only way Ferrus paid tribute to his brother. The Gorgon had long since obtained the schematics to a void shield modification favored by the Nineteenth, known as Reflex Shields. By recalibrating the engines and void shields into a harmonic resonance, all forms of radiation were redirected so that vessels would appear as only a shimmer, virtually undetectable in the blackness of space. However, Reflex Shields meant the vessel was virtually unshielded, and so Ferrus had never made use of it except in the most dire of circumstances, keeping his access to it a secret from all except Vulkan and Corax.

As the Fist of Iron streaked towards the surrounded Throneworld, a small flotilla of Reflex-shielded transports lurked in its shadow, unnoticed behind the distraction of the flagship far ahead of them. Aboard this rag-tag collection were all manner of ships containing nearly ten thousand Astartes and Ferrus himself, though they had been forced to leave their heavy armor behind. Though most traitors were occupied besieging the Throneworld, not all were so lost to violence and madness. The guns of Perturabo began to lash out, flaying the hull and outer decks alike as they inflicted a thousand thousand cuts to the glorious charge of Ferrus's flagship. Yet the Fist was a Gloriana-class battleship, a titanic chariot that had borne a primarch for almost two hundred years, and despite how much damage it had taken, it was still intact enough for this final, glorious duty. The Fist of Iron did not slow as it plowed through the lesser vessels maintaining the picket lines, frigates and destroyers shattering beneath its furious charge. Its rampage drew all eyes to it as it cleared a path through the traitor lines, and none bothered to look too closely at its wake as it streaked past. The primarch's flagship smashed into the heart of the traitors, clustered as they were above the Imperial Palace, where it finally began to take fire from all sides. Outnumbered ten thousand to one, the crew of the Fist of Iron broadcasted one final message of loyalty before intentionally detonating their overloaded reactors.

Though reactor detonations are less catastrophic than Warp-engine explosions, the effects were still cataclysmic. The grand battles and explosions taking place across Terra paled in comparison, and traitors and loyalists alike looked up to witness the death of nearly a thousand warships all at once. Hundreds more vessels were showered with debris, countless shrapnel skewering those closest, and many smaller vessels detonated as well, a chain-reaction across the traitor fleet. However, such losses, while significant, were far from crippling, as thousands more remained unharmed, and soon resumed the siege, content that the threat had been dealt with. Yet had they been more vigilant, they might have been prepared for the next hammerfall.

Hundreds of craft swarmed out of hidden transports, thunderhawks and stormbirds and all manner of vessels, accompanied by thousands of drop pods, though most were empty. The remaining might of the Tenth Legion streaked towards the traitor camps encircling the Imperial Palace, another fist of iron striking from above with no less force than their deceased flagship. The Iron Hands knew just where to strike, for Vulkan had updated Ferrus on the status of the siege while they remained in hiding, and so the Tenth moved as one toward one foe in particular: the siege-camps of the Emperor's Children. Throughout their time on Mars, Ferrus and the Tenth had waited and waited for a chance to face the legion who had once been as close as brothers to them, and their time had finally come.

The forces of the Iron Hands struck the corrupted ground occupied by the Emperor's Children with the force of a meteor. Relying on the element of surprise to make up for their deficiency in numbers, the Tenth smashed through the lines of the Third as they made their way toward the center of the camps. Their targets were easy to spot: seven massive siege engines kilometers in height, their towering bulk shimmering with the unholy energies of the Warp that sustained such colossal constructions. Yet reaching them would be no easy task, for shambling hordes of the Third Legion blocked their path. The Emperor's Children had greatly changed since the Tenth had last seen them: their bright purple livery had faded to the color of an old bruise, the shiny gold now covered in soot and dust. Buzzing flies filled the air of the camp, audible even over the constant droning of the despair-inducing Dirge Casters, while puddles of filth and sewage covered the grounds.

Cold iron met rotting flesh as the two legions slammed into each other. The Iron Hands were an unstoppable sledgehammer, smashing through the camps with incredible intensity, and the Emperor's Children fell before them. Yet the Third refused to stay dead, and many sons of Ferrus fell, shot from behind by those they had seemingly killed moments before. Shambling Plague Marines, accompanied by hordes of risen Poxwalkers formed from dead Imperial Army soldiers, began to close in on all sides. Most of the charges slowed before coming to a grinding halt, as two legions pushed against each other to see which would break first. Yet there was one that did not, for even the Plague Marines could not halt the rampage of a primarch. Ferrus Manus was Death incarnate, his Medusan Carapace and Forgebreaker unleashing annihilation to all that approached him. Accompanying him was a spearhead of his chosen sons from Clan Avernii, nearly one thousand Morlocks clad in terminator warplate led by First Captain Gabriel Santar.

Gabriel Santar

After Amadeus DuCaine's murder at the hands of Belisarius Cawl, the Tenth Legion was in need of a new First Captain, and so Ferrus Manus promoted his bodyguard Gabriel Santar to fill the role. Santar and DuCaine had never gotten along: DuCaine was personable, inspiring, and passionate; Santar was cold and suspicious, a brutal leader who possessed far more bionics than the average legionary. Where DuCaine had favored the alliance with the Salamanders and Raven Guard, Santar had promoted the legion's connections with the Emperor's Children.

Santar seemed to be a man of contradictions: he was not afraid to rebuke his primarch, and often urged caution, a legacy of his time protecting Manus. Despite his extensive bionics, Santar actually advocated for the virtues of the biological. He believed it was the legion's duty as Astartes warriors to shoulder the burdens of others and act as an inspiration to promote strength in others. This view endeared him to the gruff primarch, and many later scholars would point to Santar's appointment as a watershed moment for the Iron Tenth.

With the elite of his legion at his side, the Gorgon smashed through the traitor lines with incredible speed. One by one, the colossal siege towers came tumbling down, their foundations shattered from well-placed melta charges. Hope filled the hearts of those watching from the Palace walls as they observed the noxious clouds overhead begin to clear, and Imperial Army soldiers fought with new fervor as this aid unlooked for inspired them to fight with growing ferocity. As Manus approached the final tower, he established vox communication with the Palace, requesting support and extraction. However, it seems he was too hasty, as his charge began to bog down. The traitors pressed ever closer, for their goal lay in sight: the Saturnine Wall. If they were able to seize this position, the traitors would have unimpeded access to the Bhab Bastion and the Inner Palace, rendering the other defenses pointless.

The enemy was thicker than ever there at the final tower, the elite of the Emperor's Children moving to block their path to the siege tower, which rumbled ever closer to the Palace walls. Deafening waves of sound blasted from colossal Dirge Casters, nauseating the mortal defenders, for even the cover of the walls could not protect them from the sonic attack. With a grinding screech, the Tower crashed into the outermost wall, its upper ramp disgorging traitors onto the ramparts, while its daemonic ram rendered a gaping hole in the wall, through which poured hordes of the Lost and the Damned. All around the base, the Iron Hands struggled to pierce the traitor defenses to get close enough to bring it down, barely three hundred out of a thousand still at their primarch's side. The clouds began to thicken once more, raining down soot, while the buzzing of insects intensified as swarms of daemonic pests began to cover the ground. Even the Iron Hands began to feel the aura of despair which had so affected the loyal defenders. Hulking terminators shambled into combat with their Morlock counterparts, who reacted with horror as they recognized them as the Phoenix Guard, the elite bodyguard of their primarch, which could only mean one thing: Fulgrim was here.

Despite his superhuman toughness, Ferrus felt his gorge rise at the sight of his daemonic brother before him, more awful than any mechanical horror or icon of debauchery he had faced on Mars. Where his bodyguard had been bloated monsters, Fulgrim was skeletally thin, his once-beautiful hair now limp and lifeless, faded to the color of ashes. His armor was unnaturally rusted, nicked and scarred as though it had been abandoned for centuries, and dust cascaded behind him like sand from a broken hourglass. In his hands was Fireblade, the peerless sword Ferrus had crafted so long ago, and it alone seemed unaffected by the rot. Yet it was Fulgrim's face that held his attention the longest: it retained an awful beauty, a portrait of utter despair and resignation, the deepest apathy and loathing imaginable.

"Ferrus…" Fulgrim rasped in a hollow voice devoid of any satisfaction. "It's been so long, brother."

"You are not my brother. Not anymore. The iron of my hammer is more kin to me than you now, daemon." Ferrus boomed back.

"Forgebreaker is more my child than yours, lest you forget who crafted it. But it doesn't matter. Nothing really matters. When rust consumes your iron, then you too will understand the Grandfather as I have."

"Rust may consume iron, but envy consumes itself." Ferrus retorted, and there was nothing more to say. The two demigods began to battle, two utterly opposed yet frighteningly similar forces of nature. Ferrus was unbreakable, a wall of iron weathering every blow before smashing back with monumental force. Yet Fulgrim was now a creature of endurance as well, the dark powers given to him granting him both size and incredible resilience that allowed him to shrug off mortal blows before striking back. Fulgrim had always been an exceptional duelist, and Fireblade sang as it moved in for the killing blow, a precision decapitation strike aimed at Manus's head.

A resounding clang echoed throughout the battlefield, louder than even the buzzing flies. Fireblade had struck true, but Ferrus still stood. As the dust cleared, the blade was lodged in the side of Ferrus's helmet, and had failed to penetrate the metal. Before Fulgrim could withdraw his sword, the Gorgon pistoned his metal arm up, shattering the blade even as his servo-harness unleashed the white-hot fire of a plasma cutter into the Phoenician's face. A keening wail erupted from Fulgrim, and he reeled back. But Ferrus would not relent. He sank blow after blow into the daemon, his bare fists far more effective than his hammer had been, before wrapping his hands around his brother's throat.

Ferrus squeezed Fulgrim's throat, attempting to throttle the man who had been his closest friend. Yet the Phoenician was no longer a man, and rose up, grabbing Ferrus and physically throwing him off. Fulgrim's form began to swell, vast leathery wings unfurling from his back, every feather sloughing soot and ash. His gauntlets sharpened into razor-sharp claws, which glowed with sullen heat, and all around, his Emperor's Children fought with new fervor, inspired by their primarch's daemonic presence. The Iron Hands began to fall back through the broken wall, for this was too much even for them, and only Ferrus remained, a lone defiant figure in the face of insurmountable odds. The Gorgon grinned, a fearsome sight, before turning and running through the same gap his sons had fled. The Third Legion watched in disbelief, for none would have believed the Tenth capable of such cowardice. With a groaning roar, Fulgrim's sons began to give chase, but they did not get very far.

Unheard beneath the droning of insects and the roar of battle, a rain of shells came hurtling from the skies. Lobbed from deep inside the Palace at coordinates marked by the Iron Hands during the battle, dozens of warheads struck the siege tower, bringing it tumbling down on the traitorous hordes that scrambled to get clear. Fulgrim, who had not moved, was struck by hundreds of rounds, his daemonic form struggling to remain coherent in the face of such firepower. As he struggled to get to his feet, the Phoenician burned as he was doused in phosphex, the unnatural green flames scorching away his essence faster than it could regrow. In the confusion, Ferrus had returned from the Palace, and now stood above his brother, every weapon in his servo-harness firing without cease. When the smoke cleared, only Ferrus remained, unbroken above a pile of ash. As the Emperor's Children witnessed their father's banishment, they began to fall back en masse. Their mortal allies were soon routed, and the gaping wound in the Saturnine Wall was soon bulldozed shut once more, leaving only scars and ash to mark the traitor's advance. The Iron Hands had achieved a seminal victory over their foe, inflicting devastating casualties and gaining the Palace a brief respite. However, this was borne at a high cost, losing nearly eight thousand Astartes, including nine tenths of Clan Avernii, which contained most of the legion's veterans. With Horus wounded and unconscious, Mortarion missing, and Vulkan busy commanding, it fell to Ferrus to lead the rapid reaction forces, and for an entire week, he led his sons without rest throughout the length of the Palace. They defended ever-shrinking lines as the Iron Warriors and Crimson Fists swarmed through the overwhelmed defenders in search of the final kill.

Yet their efforts had not been in vain, and hope soon arrived to light their darkest hour. Striking from above like vengeful bolts of lightning, the Night Lords had arrived in the nick of time. Thousands of midnight-blue armored legionaries filled the Palace, driving the foe back on all sides and relieving the beleaguered defenders. In orbit, the dozen or so Iron Hands vessels had come alongside the remnants of Battlefleet Solar to join the armada of the Word Bearers, and together they broke the traitor fleets, who began fleeing for their lives. The Gorgon knew nothing of this, however, ensconced deep within the Palace in their last-ditch efforts to repel ever-more frantic traitor attacks. As Ferrus rallied his men for one final push, joined by the Custodes themselves, he stiffened, his mind assaulted by a vision.

Ferrus blinked. The noise and tumult in the crowded halls of the Inner Sanctum were gone, replaced with an endless expanse of dunes softly whispering as the winds blew over them. Looking at his arms, they were as they were centuries before, the ever-creeping silver barely past his wrists instead of beyond his elbows.

"My son." A bass voice that the Gorgon would recognize anywhere boomed from behind him, and the primarch turned around. There stood his father just as Ferrus remembered him: a proud man in heavy armor, and on his head was a scarlet-plumed helmet. In one hand was a tall lance of purest silver with an aquiline banner, and an auric sword in the other, whose end was buried in the corpse of a reptilian beast, stirring feebly at the Emperor's feet. Its scales were iridescent gray, shining with the light of devoured stars, and hints of green veins could be seen beneath its rippling hide.

"Father." Ferrus knelt. "The Siege goes poorly. I fear our strength is all but expended."

"It's alright, Ferrus. Your brothers have arrived, and I go now to face Lion." The Emperor grasped Ferrus by the shoulder, staring into the primarch's eyes. "This siege will not last forever, and Humanity faces other threats than that of Chaos. We are not machines, my son: the Human spirit is more indomitable than most give it credit for. It has kept us going and will allow us to persist for many millennia to come, and we must not neglect it in favor of the body."

"Take me with you, father. We could face the Archtraitor together!"

"It's too late for that. Do not forget what you have seen and heard here. You must be my pillar of iron: do not be afraid to shoulder the burdens of the common man. Beware of the thinking machines, and reject the empty promises of the gods out among the stars."

Post-Heresy: Tempered by Fire

Assisted by the vengeful Custodes, the Iron Hands led the final push in defense of the Inner Sanctums near the entrance to the Imperial Dungeons. Though vastly outnumbered, the Tenth gave a valiant account of themselves, claiming the lives of many traitors before the battle ended. By the time the Siege had finally come to an end, the Iron Hands found themselves nearly extinct: only a thousand still lived upon Terra, and many of those required dreadnought implantation to survive. The Iron Hands spent many months assisting the repair efforts, recovering their dead from beneath mounds of corpses and saving their gene-seed for future use. Only five vessels of the Tenth had survived the battle in orbit, and so those that had were soon filled with the equipment of the slain to be taken back for later use.

Though his legion was the smallest present on Terra, the Iron Hands held the distinct advantage of having the most active primarch. Of the six primarchs who had been on Terra at the time of the Siege, only Ferrus remained in command: Horus and Mortarion were incapacitated, Konrad Curze was dead, and Lorgar and Vulkan were busy governing Terra and keeping the Imperial bureaucracy moving lest it stop and not start up again. Ferrus 1had long been stoic, and though he grieved as much as any other at the Emperor's fall, he knew he could not allow this to break him. He greatly desired to unleash his wrath upon the remaining traitors, but as always, duty called, and thus he remained on Terra. It was Ferrus whose logistical genius allowed for a swift purge of the traitor forces still on Terra, and it was he who directed the vast asset recovery of entire legions worth of equipment scavenged from the slain.

To Ferrus's joy, a scouting expedition to Medusa revealed many of his sons had survived the Leonine Heresy. Nearly twenty thousand Astartes still remained on Medusa, and they soon journeyed to Terra to serve their father once more. With his legion united behind him, Ferrus yearned to return to combat, to strike back at the oathbreakers who had ruined his father's kingdom, but one final task remained, a duty more difficult than any before it: overseeing the Ingens Sepultura.

Ingens Sepultura

The losses of the Siege of Terra can never truly be estimated, for even in victory an incalculable loss was incurred. Though the Emperor had technically survived, he was now beyond communication, and so it fell to his sons to pick up the reins and carry on. Those who had fallen in his name were the honored dead, whose blood watered the seed of the Imperium to come. The collective sorrow of trillions needed an outlet, and so Ferrus Manus oversaw the Ingens Sepultura, a grand event lasting for months whose solemnity matched the enthusiasm of the Ullanor Triumph so many years before. The catharsis of an empire was expressed through the thousands of smaller funerals being held: the honored dead of nine legions and soldiers of all branches were cremated and buried within the vast halls of the Tower of Heroes, and many hours were given to eulogies and epitaphs. However, the necessities of time and convenience meant only a small fraction of the fallen would be honored, for the confusion of the day meant many more lay forgotten and undiscovered.

The final act of the Ingens Sepultura was the Cortege Dominus Nox, the burial of Konrad Curze. The primarch of the Night Lords had fallen at the hands of the Archtraitor in the name of the Emperor, and legends of his deeds soon circulated across the Imperium. Such a martyr required a suitable burial, and so Ferrus gathered his remaining brothers to lead this grand procession. The rubble of the biggest war in Humanity's history was swept aside, and for an entire week, nearly forty thousand Astartes of the Eighth Legion marched across the width of the Imperial Palace as they accompanied the casket containing their fallen genefather. At the very end, Curze's surviving brothers hoisted the bier, carrying their fallen brother in somber procession to be laid in the Imperial Crypt contained within the Tower of Heroes, and together they carved his name at the very summit of the Column of Glory. The Bell of Lost Souls, which had been ringing throughout the Ingens Sepultura, tolled one final time that day for Konrad Curze before falling silent once more.

The Gorgon gathered the scattered forces of many legions, using his authority and martial genius to forge a new weapon to strike back at the traitors, thus initiating the Scouring. The Iron Hands and their allies began to prowl the Solar System, striking out at targets marked out for them by forces of the Alpha Legion. Their first target was Mars, and Ferrus himself led the Fourth Conquest of Mars, accompanied by legions of Adeptus Mechanicus cohorts from across the galaxy who sought to join in the liberation of the Forge World Principal. As ever, their political jockeying and naked ambition disgusted Ferrus; Kelbor-Hal had earned the Gorgon's respect for his sacrifice, but his successors were unworthy imitations, and thus the Gorgon remained a distant commander and only rarely interacted with them. Under his brilliant generalship, the forces of the Scouring smashed through the disunited Dark Mechanicum forces mismanaging Mars. Soon the traitors were falling back across the planet, scurrying into the vast network of tunnels stretching beneath the surface, and although attempts to pursue them were made, the warrens proved too vast. Ferrus ordered the tunnels sealed, their entrances caved in and placed under guard for all time lest they return.

However, one final concentration of traitors remained, one so dangerous it required Ferrus's attention personally: the armies of Belisarius Cawl. The Heretek Supreme had over a year and the resources of Mars to perfect his craft, and the Iron Hands battled many abominable chimeras attired in the livery of the Thirteenth Legion. These scions of Guilliman were taller and faster than regular Astartes, clad in strange armor variants and possessing gravitic vehicles that far surpassed even those of the technologically-minded Tenth Legion. Yet for all their might, they were few, and the loyalists were many, and so Cawl's forces were pushed back, though the traitor himself escaped. In the ruins of his laboratories, an unsettling discovery was made: the headless corpse of an Apothecary from the Emperor's Children was discovered, one that lacked the diseased mutations of his kin. However, Ferrus had little time for such mysteries, opting instead to pursue Cawl as he retreated. The Gorgon chased the Heretek Supreme across Mars, seeking to end his evil once and for all, and soon tracked him to the region known as the Noctis Labyrinthus. The haunted canyons of the Labyrinth of Night had long been reputed as a place of evil, but the Gorgon would not be dissuaded, following the trail with a company of his sons by his side. The trail soon went cold in those strange lands, and one by one the Iron Hands fell, attacked by ancient rogue machines and other horrors. Soon only Ferrus remained, having traversed the non-Euclidean geometries of the cursed land until he stood before the Vaults of Moravec. The Vaults had originally been sealed by the Emperor himself, but had clearly been breached since then, and so Ferrus entered through their ruptured gates. Nothing is known of what lay within, for when the primarch emerged, he had a haunted look in his silver eyes, and would not speak of it, only that the Emperor's words now made sense to him.

With Mars secured, the rest of the Solar System soon fell, and the Scouring began to retrace the steps of the Great Crusade as they ascertained the state of the Imperium. The Iron Hands continued to grow in size, rapidly inducting new recruits until the legion stood at a respectable size once more. Ferrus kept a close eye on his sons, remembering the Emperor's final words to him, and so the rampant dysmorphia that had plagued the legion before the Leonine Heresy did not resurface. However, the Gorgon remained distant from these newer sons, preferring to spend his time with the legion's dreadnoughts who still remembered the Tenth as they were before the fires of betrayal. Eventually he could take it no more, and ten years after the reconquest of Mars, Ferrus Manus traveled to Terra to meet with Vulkan. The two primarchs bonded one final time as they worked on Ferrus's ship together, incorporating all sorts of strange technologies and upgrades into the Sisypheum, a modified strike cruiser.

After leaving Terra, Ferrus Manus disappears from the annals of the Imperium as the first primarch to vanish after the Heresy, though he would not be the last. One by one his brothers followed suit, but unlike them, there remains no knowledge of his destination, and not even rumors of possible sightings remain. The Tenth continued to wage war in his absence, falling under the command of the Warmaster and then Lorgar until they perished, and so the Iron Hands were left to their own devices after the conclusion of the Scouring. The Iron Hands still hold out hope that one day their father will return, but they are a practical legion, and have long since given up searching for him. His teachings still inspire the Tenth, who have become the pillar of iron spoken of in the legends of the legion. They continue to fight on countless battlefields in defense of the weak, taking on ever-greater burdens as the years pass. They continue to face everything the galaxy can throw at them as they weather blow after blow from the myriad horrors of the uncaring universe. Yet the ravages of time have worn deeply, and the weight of their ever-increasing burdens threatens to snap the Iron beneath it.

As of the end of M41, the legion is scattered across the northern reaches of the galaxy, fighting in dozens of warzones as they strive to hold back the tides of darkness on an ever-widening front. Heretics and xenos of every description continue to arise in system after system, and so the Iron Hands have become bogged down trying to put out countless smaller rebellions lest the fires of heresy grow too large. Medusa itself is on the verge of falling under siege from their ancient rivals, the Emperor's Children, as the traitors flow out in every direction from the Eye of Terror. Only a small portion of the legion has been able to brave the ever-worsening warp storms to defend their ancient homeworld, but their numbers have been bolstered by the armies of the Imperium that flow in as they come to reinforce the Cadian Gate and its outlying systems. The Sons of Medusa are as indomitable as their world, and they remain committed to the Imperium no matter the odds.

Homeworld, Recruitment, and Gene-seed

The Tenth Legion of the 41st Millennium is a far cry from its earlier incarnations. Ten thousand years of non-stop warfare have forged the sons of Ferrus anew many times, though at their heart they have retained the iron determination which has characterized them since the days of the Storm Walkers. Due to the sheer lethality of the Siege of Terra, the majority of the legionaries present for that titanic struggle were implanted into dreadnoughts. Had the Iron Hands devoted their full numbers to the siege, it is likely they would have been rendered extinct, or doomed to a slow and tedious rebuilding. As it happens, the majority of their legion was cut off from Terra, gathering around their homeworld of Medusa to repel an attack that never really came. While this was a source of shame for these legionaries, it also meant the legion was still combat effective unlike many other legions. Thus the Iron Hands reoriented their doctrines of mechanized warfare to include the large dreadnought contingent that formed the core of the legion's veterans. Many of these warriors went on to fight in the Scouring, and even now, ten thousand years later, it is estimated nearly a hundred of these Iron Elders still remain, though they only see battle in the most dire of circumstances.

With the bulk of the legion's veterans entombed, the majority of those Astartes on Medusa were mere battle-brothers, relatively inexperienced, which was a lucky turn of events that their primarch took full advantage of. Ferrus Manus had never been comfortable with his legion's penchant for unnecessary bodily augmentation, nor happy with their obsession with his iron hands. Thus he used this opportunity to appoint new commanders, those more in line with his way of thinking, and so by the time he vanished, the legion was well on its way to reform. The practice of bionic replacement became less frequent, and most legionaries opted instead for vat-grown replacement organs, though after their primarch's disappearance, the custom of lopping off their left hands slowly crept back into fashion. However, there were those who disapproved of this change in philosophy, especially from the veterans and elders, and a split in the legion began to develop, a cancer in the heart of the Tenth that would take millennia to come to fruition.

In the millennia after the Scouring, the Iron Hands began to work more closely with the newly-founded Imperial Guard. The ravages of the Leonine Heresy had left the Iron Hands, like many other legions, desperately low on ships and armor. Yet their primarch had scorned working more closely with the Adeptus Mechanicus, and a rift began to form that was only soothed with his disappearance. An embassy of the legion's Iron Elders reestablished ties with the Red Planet, though this had only worsened the philosophical divide. Thus by M35, the legion was nearly split down the middle in terms of operational doctrine, between those who favored mechanical augmentation and ties with the Adeptus Mechanicus, known as Supremacists, and those who preferred bionic replacement and alliances with the Astra Militarum, the so-called purists. The Clan-Companies of Medusa began to align themselves with these camps, and intra-legion rivalries degenerated into open hostility. Unfortunately for the Imperium, the events of this schism coincided with the Nova Terra Interregnum.

Nova Terra Interregnum

Near the end of M34, a mysterious threat known as the Pale Wasting had emerged from the Ghoul Stars, contained only with great difficulty by the Eighth Legion, who revealed to Terra that they had fought a 'star-spawned plague', and they had 'unmade that which cannot die'. Shortly after, heavy warp storm activity followed by Chaotic incursions arose across the Imperium, drawing away many forces of the Nine Loyal Legions. In response to these storms, the Ur-Council of the world of Nova Terra declared the authority of the High Lords to be null, claiming dominion over the western half of the Imperium, including the region of space containing the Forge World of Moirae.

The tech-priests of Moirae had favored an obscure doctrine that they could foretell the future based on the flickering of the holy Astronomican. This strange belief spread like wildfire throughout the worlds under the sway of Nova Terra, and soon the Adeptus Mechanicus was riven by civil war on a scale unseen since the Leonine Heresy. The Ecclesiarchy, at this time headquartered on Ophelia VII, threw its support behind Nova Terra, which led to a civil war known as the Great Schism from those Cardinal worlds aligned to Terra. Soon the entire Imperium was ablaze with sporadic warfare, a sad state of affairs which continued for over nine hundred years and culminated in the Reign of Blood, and ended with the intervention of the Astartes Legions.

Though most legions refrained from interfering with Imperial politics or were kept busy fighting opportunistic xenos or Chaos incursions that sought to take advantage of the war, the Iron Hands were dealt a far more devastating blow. The tenets of Moirae had infected the Supremacists, and under the leadership of Iron Captain Hekkan, Clan Raukaan initiated open warfare against Clan Morragul, and the clans aligned with them renamed themselves to be the Sons of Medusa, while their Purist opponents claimed the title of Red Talons. The Tenth Legion was split between these two factions, and within ten years, a third of the legion had died, including nearly half of the Iron Elders, an incalculable loss of wisdom. Not since the dark days of the Leonine Heresy had a legion turned upon themselves in such a manner, and the Iron Hands tore themselves apart with methodical and calculated fury. In the end, the Schism came to an end with the destruction of Moirae, and the Adeptus Mechanicus purged themselves of their pernicious dogmas. The Iron Hands were rescued from total destruction through the intervention of the Night Lords, who brought news that Nova Terra had been controlled by the dreaded Firewing of the Dark Angels, a foul plot to weaken the Imperium. With this news, many Supremacists abandoned Clan Raukaan and the tenets of Moirae, and thus the Tenth was whole once more.

In the wake of this schism, Clan Raukaan and the remaining Clan-Companies were purged and refounded. The legion was incredibly thorough, and no more than a handful of traitors escaped their wrath, fleeing into the nearby Eye of Terror. The Iron Hands rededicated themselves to the Imperium once more, and have remained loyal ever since. They had purged themselves of the last vestiges of their unhealthy fixation of steel over flesh, which many had speculated was a quirk of their gene-seed. This was now proven false, and to this day, the Iron Hands exhibit a remarkably pure gene-seed. While their legion has never reached the size of the Word Bearers or Night Lords, they remain one of the middle to larger legions. Ferrus's genetic legacy has made his sons as tough and proud as the iron in their names, and they have always been reluctant to call upon their cousin legions for support. Nor are outsiders especially welcomed to their homeworld of Medusa, which is much as it was during the days of the Great Crusade: harsh, rugged, and unforgiving. It remains a Death World, and the dangers it faces have only increased as the years pass due to the growth of the Eye of Terror. Its skies are littered with shattered ships and the detritus of ten thousand years, an ever-present danger for any traveling to and from the quiet world. All native children of Medusa are born with purple eyes, a common mutation on worlds close to the Eye, including Cadia, and thus all legionaries, save those with mechanical implants, bear this trait too. Even vat-grown replacements soon change to match, and the legion has long since given up trying to eradicate it, for it seems to have no ill effects. The deserts of Medusa remain inhospitable wastelands, wracked by tectonic instability, and so there is no permanent Fortress-Monastery as other legions have. Instead, each Clan-Company possesses a Land-Behemoth, a colossal mobile city that drives endlessly across the tundras and deserts, fiercely territorial of the villages which pay fealty to one Clan or another. Only the Ten Great Clans possess such wonders of archaeotech: the dozens of Clans Minor making up the rest of the legion are forced to make do with lesser craft.

The clan system of Medusa has remained alive and well for over ten thousand years. The various Clans are responsible for their own recruitment, and are fiercely independent, rejecting any central planning or organization that might streamline the process. Might makes right on Medusa, and so while any of the Ten are able to enforce their will on the Clans Minor, such attempts are few and far between, lest their victims band together for revenge. These rivalries extend even after aspirants are inducted into the Tenth Legion, and so the various companies maintain rivalries, though none have ever erupted into hostilities since the days of the Moirae Schism. Thus the legion remains a cohesive whole, for all clans and companies prize strength and efficiency, and will put aside their differences in service of the legion and Imperium.

The Iron Tenth has long maintained its traditional divisions, standing in contrast to the more uniform legions. The easiest method of displaying the Iron Hands' structures is to follow the life of an average legionary. Most legions are rather reclusive about their homeworlds and recruitment, but the Tenth are unusually open, relying upon their homeworld's harsh climate to keep the nosy and weak away. Thus the Inquisition, and indeed many other branches of Imperial governing bodies, have managed to put together a picture of the career path, as it were, of an Astartes in the Tenth Legion.

Our journey begins in the harsh wilderness of Medusa, in one of the many small villages that eke out a meager existence in the unforgiving deserts and tundra. Almost all tribes are semi-nomadic, migrating in search of new stocks of swiftly-depleting resources, both on foot and on massive land-crawlers. However, in all villages, every birth is meticulously recorded by the village elders, and every village belongs to a clan, great or small. The legacy of Ferrus Manus has left Medusan society intensely focused on efficiency, and over-recruitment and overpopulation would doom the legion as surely as under-population. The clan is everything in Medusa, and all children are raised communally, separate from their parents and subjected to harsh conditions designed to strengthen them. Thus when each potential aspirant comes of age, clan representatives come to take them away to the proving grounds, dumping hundreds of young boys upon the unforgiving slopes of Mount Karaashi. There they must climb to the summit, just as the primarch did ten thousand years before, a dangerous trek that only the strongest complete. Those who are unable are taken back to their villages, for Medusa cannot afford to let its people die.

After completing this first step, the new aspirant is taken to be trained in combat and the philosophy of the legion. As he ages, the recruit is implanted with the various organs required to become an Astartes, and within five years, is ready to join the scout company of his clan. Until this stage, the aspirant has trained with all others, but from now on, the clan becomes his life. It is at this stage where hypno-indoctrination is utilized for the first time, a marked contrast from the other legions, who tend to utilize it throughout. However, the method the Iron Hands use for hypno-indoctrination is a closely-guarded secret: the Ironwrought Chip.

Ironwrought Chip

In the glory days of the Great Crusade, the concept of hypno-indoctrination was relatively unknown, utilized only by outliers such as the Death Guard, who faced such horrors as to test the nerve of even the hardiest. However, the fires of the Leonine Heresy burned the Imperium deeply, and in the wake of such a catastrophe, many began to question just how half of the Emperor's legions turned their backs on the Master of Mankind so easily. Thus under the command of Warmaster Lupercal, the mass rush techniques were banned, as it was believed the morally and psychologically unsuitable were not being weeded out properly. The process of recruitment was greatly slowed after the Scouring, and hypno-indoctrination became the norm across the loyal legions, creating a deep-seated loyalty in the new generations of Astartes

While most Astartes aspirants gain experience through the use of hypnocasques, the Iron Hands have rejected the use of such slow and cumbersome methods. In their place, hypno-indoctrination is done through the use of the semi-heretical Ironwrought Chip. This cunning artifice was developed by the legendary Frater Thamatica, who fused an archaeotech relic known as the Heart of Iron with the Doctrina Wafers of the Legio Cybernetica. The Ironwrought Chips are implanted in the brains of every legionary of the Iron Tenth, and the marked improvements in coordination and intelligence often appear after the surgery. Each legionary thus implanted becomes his primarch in miniature, a noble warrior of peerless strength who is willing to sacrifice himself to help others.

However, many suspect ulterior functions in these Chips, especially Puritans in the fortresses of the Inquisition. The Tenth Legion is also noted for the use of cortical dampeners, unobtrusive disks of metal used in enemy ship boardings when targets are ordered to be taken alive. Those implanted with dampeners become sedate and obedient, incapable of voicing dissent no matter their prior loyalties. There is an uncanny resemblance between the design of the Ironwrought Chips and the cortical dampeners so favored by the Tenth, and the Inquisition has tried many times to get its hands on such devices, though they have yet to succeed.

Thus as the aspirant is trained as a scout, he is immersed in the idiosyncrasies of his particular clan, and by the time he passes the final trials to become a fully-fledged Astartes, he is a full member of his clan. From there he fights like every other legionary, gaining experience as a line-brother, and with experience and skill may rise to become a sergeant, and later a captain as the head of his own company. Yet this is but the surface of the legion. The Iron Hands adhere to a system known as 'organized compartmentalization'. Every part of the legion is akin to a cog in a machine, with its own particular role and duties. Thus some companies specialize in assault, or armored warfare, or even more mundane tasks such as liaison or ambassador to other factions. The sum total of this organization forms a gestalt whose efficacy far outweighs the sum of its parts, and there are few sights more fearsome than an Iron Host descending upon the foe in their thousands. Alas, such occasions are incredibly rare, for the companies are greatly dispersed across the stars, for the foes of Man press in on all sides.

Now that the legionary has become a Captain, he is entitled to vote on decisions within his Clan. The Iron Hands have long been ruled by committees of varying levels, and the voice of the collective is considered infallible. Even the top echelons of the legion are ruled thus: after serving as captain for many years, the Astartes may ascend to become Chieftain, the equivalent of chapter master in other legions, and is responsible for not only the battle-brothers under his command, but also the mortal men and women of his clan back home on Medusa. The clans are fiercely competitive, vying with each other for resources and glory, and thus only the most experienced can be trusted to shoulder the mantle of Chieftain. Unlike in other legions, the Chieftains do not have a direct say in how the legion as a whole is governed. Their time is already stretched as it is, managing both the demands of their clan as well as prosecuting the endless wars in the Emperor's name, and so in their place, the legion is ruled by the Iron Council.

Combat Doctrines and Organization

In the aftermath of their primarch's disappearance, it was evident no single man would be able to lead the legion as Ferrus Manus once had, and so the office of legion master was quietly forgotten. In its place, the Iron Council arose, an unwieldy body composed of forty-one members known as Iron Fathers, an organization without comparison in the other legions. The number forty-one is both practical and symbolic: despite fluctuations in clan size, the number of clans has remained constant, with ten Great Clans and thirty-one Clans Minor. The number is also symbolic of the mountains of Medusa's Iron Peaks, the vast range whose apex is the legendary Mount Karaashi, the grand summit who is represented by Clan Avernii, the glorious First Clan. The Iron Council does however periodically elect members from among their ranks to serve as Iron Lord, a temporary role akin to the dictators of the ancient Romii, who were chosen to lead in times of great trouble. However, such an election is not undertaken lightly, and most Iron Lords die in the course of battle as opposed to being asked to step down after a crisis has abated.

In place of Chieftains on the Iron Council, the ranks of this hallowed institution are filled by the wisest of the clan. Most often, the Iron Fathers of the Clans Minor come from the Techmarines of the legion, long respected for their knowledge of the mechanical. In the Great Clans, nearly all are represented by venerable dreadnoughts, who have survived since the dark days of the Leonine Heresy. However, such ancients cannot long stay awake, and so their authority is mostly in name only, and the day to day decisions are carried out by lesser representatives from the Great Clans. However, as of M41, there remains one notable exception to this trend, the infamous Clan Raukaan. Long distrusted since their role in the Moirae Schism millennia before, the Third Great Clan has teetered on the edge of outright condemnation, a situation that has continued under its current representative, Kardan Stronos.

Iron Lord Kardan Stronos

Few of the Tenth Legion are as cold and unforgiving as the infamous Kardan Stronos, the Iron Heart of the Iron Tenth, but harsh times call for harsh measures. Across the Imperium, the Iron Hands are renowned for their strength, for being willing to shoulder the burdens of others in a way few others do. Indeed, many past legionaries are beatified as saints of the Ecclesiarchy, and the Iron Hands are incredibly close compared to other legions. Yet few of these traits are present in its leader, who is both shunned and honored for his actions. Unlike the vast, vast majority of legionaries, Stronos has performed the almost sacrilegious act of transferring clans. It is technically not forbidden to change clans, but it is seen as grave disrespect to one's original clan, and clans who accept such refugees are looked down upon.

Once a sergeant of Clan Vurgaan, he willingly transferred to Clan Garrsak in order to advance his career, before changing once more to Clan Raukaan when the opportunity for advancement presented itself. Upon assuming the role of Iron Father, Stronos swiftly adopted the ruthless nature of Clan Raukaan, and won acclaim for his role in exposing the heretical Iron Father Kristos as a Chaos-worshiper. Stronos has fought on countless battlefields, applying brutal efficiency to win war after war. He espouses a philosophy of heavy reliance upon the machine, suppressing his emotions in his belief in the old credo that the flesh is weak, and most of his body is now mechanical.

Stronos was originally named Iron Lord to handle the incursion of Hive Fleet Moloch, a Tyranid splinter fleet that swept westward after the destruction of Hive Fleet Behemoth in 745.M41. Stronos rallied nearly half the legion to the cause, not only surviving but emerging the victor in a climactic battle in the Regis System. Since then, he has led the legion to countless victories over the course of nearly three centuries, and is the longest leader since the primarch himself. Technically the Iron Council could order him to step down at any time, but none can say how Stronos might react to such a command, and many tremble at the thought of a mighty legion such as the Iron Hands falling to civil war at such a dark time in the Imperium's history.

Under the commands of Iron Lord Stronos, the Iron Hands have continued to flourish, and are spread across many battlefields in defense of the Imperium. Though cruel, Stronos prizes the purity of the machine, and has yet to impose his ideology upon the rest of the legion, possibly out of caution that it might interfere with the legion's efficiency. The Tenth Legion is primarily active in Segmentum Obscurus, single-handedly patrolling the wild region with little aid. Though Medusa is incredibly close to the Eye of Terror, there is little need for the legion to patrol its shoals, for such is the domain of the Space Wolves, and the two legions are highly close as a result of this arrangement. The Tenth still maintain heavy fortifications around their home system, but most of their forces are deployed elsewhere, on many different battlefields. The combat doctrines of the Tenth are tied to their clans, and thus it is a rare occasion for two clans to be deployed to the same warzone. However, most clan-companies utilize similar strategies to what their ancestors did millennia before, placing great focus upon combined arms and mechanized warfare.

The Tenth Legion has many allies, though a more accurate statement is they have many debtors. Their selfless heroism has won them the praise and admiration from all true servants of the God-Emperor, and the undying hatred of heretics and xenos. Even more than the Space Wolves, the Iron Hands are the closest with the Salamanders, a bond going back to the early days of the Great Crusade. Their alliance has stayed strong for ten thousand years, and shows no sign of diminishing as the two continue to work closely on the rare occasions that the Eighteenth venture beyond the confines of Segmentum Solar. They also maintain good relations with the Sons of Horus, and a competitive rivalry with the Death Guard as to which legion is the toughest. Both place preeminent emphasis on resilience, but the sons of Ferrus are uneasy with the obsession that the sons of Mortarion have on the concept that 'might makes right'. The Iron Hands prefer to emphasize offensive strength rather than defensive resilience, a philosophy shared by their next-closest allies, the Imperial Guard.

After the fires of the Leonine Heresy, Warmaster Horus decreed the Edicts Martial, reorganizing the Imperial Army into the Astra Militarum and forbidding the entanglement of their command structure with that of the Legiones Astartes. Though a wise move overall, it was inconvenient for the Iron Hands, who found themselves unable to order regiments to garrison the worlds they conquered. Thus to get around this restriction, Ferrus ordered the creation of the Chainveil. Originally recruited from the populace of Medusa much like any other planetary defense force, Ferrus recognized the strength of his people, and formed many regiments that would support his dispersed conquest fleets. During the Leonine Heresy, these armies worked in tandem with the legion forces stationed around Medusa, and the two groups became an incredibly effective force that repelled myriad traitor raiding parties that sought to take advantage of the war. After the Edicts Martial were enacted, Ferrus used his influence to move these regiments out from under the authority of the Astra Militarum, and they have remained separate ever since. The Chainveil often serve as the second wave in assaults, as well as manning the Tenth Legion's navy, for they possess a good many ships.

Aside from the Chainveil under their command, the Iron Hands maintain good to neutral relations with many Imperial Guard regiments, and are favored by the Administratum due to their willingness to help and efficiency in doing so. They maintain neutral relations with the High Lords of Terra due to Terra's lack of interest in Segmentum Obscurus, and neutral relations with the Ecclesiarchy. It is surprising to many who are only superficially familiar with the Tenth that the Adeptus Mechanicus have poor relations with the legion. On the surface, it seems as though the two should be allies, for the Iron Hands are famous for their valiant defense of Mars during the Leonine Heresy, as well as their proclivities towards armored warfare and the mysteries of the forge. However, ever since the Primarch reorganized his legion after the Heresy, the Tenth Legion has intentionally and consciously distanced themselves from the legion they used to be. Though they maintain their iron discipline over their emotions, the Iron Hands still allow themselves to feel and bond with those around them, especially of their clan, in an effort to remain human despite their many augmetics. The tech-priests of Mars see this as an unacceptable attachment to the flesh, and few adepts dare to voice positive opinions of the Tenth legion's philosophy. Another source of conflict between the two is the existence of the Telstarax. The once-grand ring surrounding Medusa has remained as it has been for ten thousand years, locked away and guarded from without under pain of death. Before his departure, Ferrus Manus ordered that none may ever enter its nightmare corridors, and his legion has maintained this watch in his absence. The grasping Mechanicus would dearly like to enter its halls in search of archaeotech, but none have ever been able to gain permission. The two have come close to war several times due to the imprudence of the tech-priests, some of whom resorting to threats, but cooler heads have prevailed each time. The Telstarax remains a source of mystery and envy, including to those who were once as brothers.

Only a fraction of the Tenth remains on Medusa to defend it, but they will fight to the last in the name of primarch and the Emperor. Most of the Iron Hands remain deployed across Segmentum Obscurus, clashing with the Chaotic cults and xenos raiders that rise up with ever-increasing frequency as the millennia pass by. The Iron Hands are as adept as any legion at purging the greenskin hordes, and they have frequently clashed with the ork empires that infest the stars under their protection. Though the entire galaxy is nominally under the control of the Imperium, vast stretches remain without the light of the Emperor or the civilizing touch of Mankind. Segmentum Obscurus is no different, and the Emperor's northern realm has been at war for centuries, torn asunder by the Great Despot of Dregruk and the Arch-Dictator of Gathrog. The two rival Waaagh! have fought each other more than they have the forces of the Imperium, and have even clashed with Chaotic raiding parties emerging from the Eye of Terror. Many clans of the Tenth remain on watch over these two rival powers, for if one side were to ever win, they would surely sweep down in their countless numbers toward the beleaguered forces of Cadia.

Of the Iron Tenth's many enemies, of particular enmity is their relations with Perturabo's sons, the Iron Warriors. During the Great Crusade, many compared the Gorgon and the Lord of Iron due to the similarities in their names, though never to their face. Ferrus never liked Perturabo, believing him to be a manipulative sociopath who threw away the lives of his men for no reason. This view was only confirmed when the Gorgon learned of Perturabo's treachery, and the two legions clashed several times during the Leonine Heresy, most notably at Beta-Garmon. The Fourth Legion has attacked Medusa many times, though this is mostly due to the planet's proximity to the Eye of Terror, and the Telstarax remains an object of interest to the Fourth Legion. As the 41st Millennium draws to a close, Imperial psykers warn of an impending attack from the Iron Warriors, who come to plunder the forbidden treasures of Medusa, accompanied by those hated even more than Perturabo's sons: the Emperor's Children. Few today are aware of the deep friendship that once existed between the Third and Tenth legions, for it seems impossible that these two foes could be anything but diametrically opposed. The Iron Hands are sworn to uphold the Imperium of Man, acting as beacons of hope as they fight in the name of the Emperor on countless battlefields. The ashen Third are their antithesis, spreading disease and filth in service to daemonic horrors, and they seek to corrupt every scrap of hope into unmitigated despair. The two legions have clashed many times over the millennia, and even now, as Sigismund's dread hosts throw themselves at the Cadian Gate, the Emperor's Tarot foretells the arrival of the fallen Third in numbers unseen since the dark days of the Leonine Heresy.

One final foe of the Tenth Legion worth noting is that of the Empire of the Severed. To the north of the world of Mordian lies the silent planet of Sarkon, home to the ancient and mysterious xenos known as the Necrons. Though these skeletal androids have been reported across the galaxy, few are as strange as that of the Sarkoni Dynasty. Rather than eradicating all life as is more commonly seen with these foul xenos, the Severed are known for their extensive use of Mindshackle Scarabs, released in uncountable numbers onto Imperial worlds. Scouts have come across Imperial worlds whose citizens act in uncanny unison to craft strange black pyramids and silver metallic constructions in service to their robotic overlords. The Iron Hands have sworn to oppose these Abominable Intelligences wherever they may be found, for such degradation is antithetical to the dignity of Man. However, even stranger than this are the rumors that the Tenth has been aided by Necrons in fighting against their own kind. On several occasions, Necron tomb ships have reported arriving unannounced to battles between the Iron Hands and the Severed, attacking the legions of the Sarkoni before departing without a word after the battle has concluded. Whether the Necrons suffer from internal divisions and rivalry is debated by the Inquisition, but it seems clear some sort of connection exists between the Tenth and the robotic xenos, for this phenomenon has never occurred elsewhere in the many recorded interactions between Humanity and the Necrons.

Beliefs and Warcry

The Iron Hands are a complex legion. From their name and preferred methods of warfare, one could easily assume that this is a legion of cold iron, of merciless logic and no emotions. However, this is simply not the case. The legacy of Ferrus Manus has remained deeply rooted in his sons, and they are fiercely devoted to his memory. His teachings, and those of Medusa, have created a legion with a firm control over their passions, efficient and utilitarian, but still human, with all the failings that come with it. There are few things more fearsome than an Iron Hands army that has given into rage, and it is a heart-wrenching sight to see the sons of Ferrus grieving over the corpses of those they failed to save. However, the most defining emotion of the Tenth Legion, one that sets them aside from all others, is optimism. The sons of Ferrus truly believe what they're doing is making a difference in the galaxy, despite all the evidence the cruel universe provides to the contrary. Thus they do not hesitate to take on ever-increasing burdens, spreading their forces further and further across Segmentum Obscurus. However, analysts of the Inquisition shudder at the thought of such a noble legion snapping under the strain, and their worst fears might have already come to pass.

Abyssal Crusade

In the aftermath of the Nova Terra Interregnum, there was much talk of refounding the Imperium, of a bright new beginning now that such dark days had come to an end. Many wildly-optimistic ideas came into vogue, and one such plan, as envisioned by Saint Basillius the Elder, was to assault the greatest known collection of traitors contained within the Eye of Terror. Using his prodigious oratory, Basillius convinced dozens of chapters from the various Legiones Astartes to embark on a grand crusade to destroy the daemon worlds that supported the traitor war effort. Nearly thirty thousand Astartes, including nearly ten thousand Iron Hands, joined in, and on 321.M37, sailed directly into the Eye of Terror.

Within an hour of the fleet entering the Eye, a vast armada erupted out, festooned with the corrupted sigils of Chaos. Cadia fell under assault for the first time since the Sixth Black Crusade nearly four hundred years before. However, the Gate's defenses stood, and the traitors retreated back into the Eye once more. Analysis of the wreckage revealed that these were not from the Traitor Legions, but once-loyal vessels. In the decades following, Basillius the Elder was revealed as an Agent of Chaos, but it was too late, for Heretic Astartes raids had already begun to greatly increase, straining the Imperial defenses near breaking point.

When the Iron Hands learned the fate of their forces, their fury was great, and they have sworn to bring their fallen brothers to justice. Many traitor warbands now claim descent from Ferrus Manus, including the Malefactors, the Iron Drakes, the Steel Confessors, and many more. These traitors retain all the skill and heavy firepower of their progenitors, though without any restraint, and countless billions have died at their hands, including many on Medusa itself after one particularly foolhardy assault by the Brazen Claws warband. Their presence is one of the few things to make the Tenth Legion set aside its legendary calm, and the sons of Ferrus will pursue these traitors without heed until this stain on their honor is removed for good.

Another central tenet of Iron Hands belief is the emphasis on sustained offense. Some legions, such as the Sons of Horus or Raven Guard, favor the attack, but their focus is more on the brutal melee. Others are more focused on defense or attrition, such as the Salamanders or Death Guard, taking the blows before striking back. However, the Iron Hands are the sole legion in the Emperor's service to combine these tenets into the unique form of mechanized warfare. By combining overwhelming firepower with rapid redeployment afforded by armor and transports, the assault of the Iron Tenth is next to impossible to stop, even by other Space Marines. The Iron Hands excel in the precise application of overwhelming force at exactly the right time to break the enemy's defenses, and will not hesitate to fall back in order to land still more blows, a rational assessment known as the Calculum Rationale. Thus the hammer is kept falling at all times as they maintain a punishing offense even while they are on the defensive, over and over again until the enemy breaks. It is for this reason that the Tenth worked so well with the Salamanders and Raven Guard during the Great Crusade, for their brother legions were especially effective at pinning the foe in place, and why they work so well with the Chainveil in more modern times, whose heavy artillery compliments their own.

The Iron Hands have a complicated relationship with the concept of faith, be it that of the Ecclesiarchy or of Mars. In the days of the Great Crusade, the Tenth were fierce proponents of the Imperial Truth, finding that its cold rationality complimented their own philosophy as well. However, just as often as they won battles did they witness the subsequent arrival of the Mechanicum, spreading their own dogmas in place of native belief. Oftentimes, the combination of the Imperial Truth and the Priesthood of Mars rendered populations confused and resentful, less willing to follow the Emperor based on the hypocrisy they saw. These misgivings only increased after the Leonine Heresy, when the Tenth watched the growth of the Ecclesiarchy, aided and abetted by the Word Bearers, with growing discomfort. The belief in the God-Emperor has few adherents in the halls of Medusa, and the cult of Mars fell to a similar level after the Moirae Schism, which saw most believers join the side of the rebellion. Thus a cool rationality prevails in the domains of the Iron Tenth, even among the mortal soldiery of the Chainveil: it is not quite the Imperial Truth, for they do not deny the existence of the supernatural, as evidenced by the existence of their librarium, but nor do they have much belief in anything other than the indomitability of the human spirit.

The Iron Hands have maintained the same colors since the days of the Storm Walkers. From head to toe, their armor is matte black, more dull than the rich shadows of the Raven Guard. The sole exception to this bleak color scheme is the burnished silver of their gauntlets, painted in remembrance of their long-lost primarch. On their left shoulder, the mailed iron hand of the legion icon proclaims a similar tale, while on the right shoulder, symbols of their clan-company denote their allegiance. The sons of Ferrus may display few trophies or embellishments on their armor, but their weapons are a different story. The Iron Hands have maintained a strong tradition of tinkering with their weaponry, be it bolter or blade, and many are master-crafted tools of war, far more deadly than the mass-produced armaments of other legions. Only the artifice of the Salamanders comes close to matching their skill, yet another bond between the two legions.

There are several warcries favored by the Tenth Legion, and the angrier the legion gets, the more often they are chanted. Thus most battles begin in silence as the legionaries focus on quickly landing a devastating blow in hopes of obtaining a sweeping advance to fold up the enemy's flank. Should this hope be dashed and the foe begins to inflict death in return, the Tenth will begin to chant "We will not die" or "The Iron Endures!", both unnerving phrases when coupled with their incredible resilience. Another war-cry of note is "The Flesh is Weak, but the Spirit is Strong!", a powerful testament to the indomitable will of Mankind, whom they continue to represent without fail as they defend the Imperium of Man from all foes.

The date had long since ceased to matter to Ferrus out here in the inter-galactic void. He now measured time in the metallic growths on his flesh, the unholy silver spreading far beyond his arms to cover not only his skin, but to burrow into his nervous system. Impossible knowledge that was not his own permeated his thoughts, ancient wars fought millions of years before the first man.

As the living metal spread, he felt his connection to his ship grow: its pain was his pain, and its machine-spirit had taken on some of his own stubbornness and bellicosity in return. Perhaps that's why it hadn't hesitated to throw itself at the grand vessel that appeared from nowhere out here, a massive slab of silvery metal the size of a moon, its very existence an affront to the laws of physics. It had been a hopeless fight from the beginning, and now Ferrus found himself aboard that strange craft, teleported against his will from the wreckage of his ship. The Gorgon found that emotions had become harder and harder as time went on, but even now he felt a little sad: that craft had borne him nearly a million light years beyond the light of the Astronomican.

The clanging of metal brought his mind back to the present. Vast blackstone doors shuttered upwards, and the unliving sentinels holding him prisoner sunk to their metal knees, forcing Ferrus down with them against his will. The soulless green light permeating the vessel intensified, and the gloom dissipated to reveal a grandiose throne. Two more of the robots stood motionless on either side, and in the middle, a semi-circle of blackstone arced with energy. Inside it, a limbless torso writhed, endlessly screaming, though no sound came out, and Ferrus's skin crawled with revulsion, though surprisingly it was his metallic skin and not his human skin doing so.

The Gorgon finally pulled his eyes away from this strange sight, looking down at the metallic giant standing in the middle of the throne. He was far larger than any other metallic warrior (Necron, came the familiar feeling of an intrusive thought), and the Phaeronic Ankh removed the last shreds of doubt left after seeing this Dais of Dominion. The strange knowledge concerning everything his silver eyes beheld surged to the forefront of Ferrus's mind once more, his head pounding with unwelcome information. One word, one concept pushed its way to the forefront, repeating endlessly in the primarch's head: Szarekh, Szarekh, Szarekh.

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A/N: I love Ferrus. I really do. There's just something really awesome about him and his affinity for big guns and big tanks, and it sucks that everybody remembers him as the chump who got killed first in the Heresy. Well not in my universe. This Ferrus is someone unforgettable. The Iron Hands are beloved heroes, not the dysmorphic stoic sociopaths that they are in canon. DuCaine is awesome too, and it hurt almost as much killing him off as it did to have Corax be the first to die, since he's my favorite loyalist even above Ferrus. Also Fulgrim is really fun to write. As you can see from the length, I was really inspired on this one, as its a full 5k words more than the previous entry, but you guys haven't seen anything yet. We're over halfway through, and next up is going to be the Blood Angels, which I'm sure everyone will look forward to just as much as they enjoy searching for the references I like to put in. As always, feel free to leave comments, reviews, and suggestions, I love to read them. Sharrowkyn, out.